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BiMLoOehseshot 
In after days 


Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2022 with funding from 
Princeton Theological Seminary Library 


_ httos://archive.org/details/inafterdaysthougOOunse 


WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 


THOUGHTS ON THE FUTURE LIFE 


BY 


W. D. HOWELLS, HENRY JAMES, JOHN 
BIGELOW, THOMAS WENTWORTH 
HIGGINSON, HENRY M. ALDEN 
WILLIAM HANNA THOMSON 
GUGLIELMO FERRERO 
JULIA WARD HOWE 
ELIZABETH STUART 
PHELPS 


WITH PORTRAITS 


HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS 
NEW YORK AND LONDON 
MCMX 


Copyright, 1910, by Harrger & BRoTHERS 


All rights reserved 


Published February, rgto 
Printed in the United States of America 


CHAP. 


Contents 


PAGE 


A CounsEL oF ConsoLATION . 3 
Wituram Dean Howe tts 
aE GRRAT LOR Bly ance nMhTG 


ELizABETH Stuart PHELPS 
Is THERE ExXIsTENCE AFTER 


LO AEE oii hen iy kann VNU ioi hates 
Joun BicELow 
DEVON OV CHEVIVELE.. eiiiay a gay OL 


Jutta Warp Hower 
THE OTHER SIDE OF MorRTALITY 107 


H. M.”ALpEen 
TED TURE DEB. SOUR Tos a 
THomas WENTWoRTH HIGGINSON 
(Pe RHUTURE OVATE A ollie 155 
Witiiam Hanna THomson, M. D. 
Rae Line Array VAS itr 
GUGLIELMO FERRERO 


Is THERE A Lire AFTER DEATH? 199 
Henry” JAMES 


I lustrations 


WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS . . . . .. Frontispiece 
ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS . . . .Facingp. 17 
Be NEUE EOM 1 hay Meet Wu aii mo walls ene hh 43 
BEE nace LO WE sh (py came Mei ce ty ts BO 
MUR LLL SR ALDEN ik psd ts vege ice bTOs 
Ps END WORTH HIGGINSON 40700501193 
CLES MANNA STHOMSON yi UM yen fa) Vrie 
Ba EMOADERRERO Ted). aura EN Pe Oy ge 


66 
HENRY JAMES 2.0%.) :, LAE od: 197 


In after days when grasses high 
O’er-top the stone where I shall lie, 
Though ill or well the world adjust 
My slender claim to honored dust, 
L shall not question or reply. 


I shall not see the morning sky; 
LT shall not hear the night-wind sigh; 
I shall be mute, as all men must 


In after days! 


But yet, now living, jain were I 
That some one then should testify, 
Saying—‘ He held his pen in trust 
To Art, not serving shame or lust.” 
Will none?—T hen let my memory dte 
In after days! 


—From “Poems on Several Occasions,’’ by, Austin Dobson. 


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A Counsel of Consolation 


William Bean Howells 


Su After Days 


I 
A QGounsel of Consolation 


Nai you can say from your think- 
ing will avail with the newly bereaved, 
but anything you say from your knowing 
and believing and feeling will be precious. 
They want your pity, your compassion, your 
sympathy; and though there never was a 
death which did not seem to accumu- 
late upon the mourners incidents of pecul- 
iar anguish, yet if you can match these 
from your own experience they will be hum- 
bly grateful. Some chance word of yours, 
the least considered or directed, shall find 
them in their sorrow and help them beyond 
your utmost hope. In our doubt of this we 
3 


Qu After Days 


shrink from trying to help, lest we rather 
hurt, but I think there could not be a greater 
mistake. Nature, which includes death as 
maternally as birth, has within it the yearning 
for companionship in grief as in joy. For 
the bereaved the world has been emptied 
of what seems to have been the supreme 
good, and the void aches for any form of 
kindness with which friendship can help 
fll it. 

I keep saying the same thing differently 
over to justify myself in offering a sugges- 
tion which will shock the witnesses of sorrow 
rather than the sorrowers themselves. My 
prime counsel to these would be to trust 
not only to eternity, but also to time, for 
consolation, and to trust time first, for time 
is here and now, and eternity is hence and 
of the future. This counsel does not imply 
forgetting; to grief, which is of love, that 
is impossible; but it is well to realize from 
the universal human experience that the 
agony of to-morrow will not be the agony 
of to-day; the sharpness will have been dulled 
a little, and a morrow will come when the 
lacerating edge will be rounded so that you 

4 


Qu After Days 


shall not feel it except as a stress that will 
no longer tear your heart, and then no stress, 
but a valued consciousness. You shall even 
wish to feel it; there will be a sweetness in 
it which you would not forego, but would 
keep with you for life. 

I cannot truly speak to the stricken from 
the absolute faith which some others can 
speak from. I am of those who patiently 
wait for the fulfilment of the hopes which 
Christianity has worded from the Greek 
philosophers rather than from the Hebrew 
prophets. Once I asked my father, a man 
whose whole life was informally but deeply 
religious, whether he kept the vivid interest 
in his doctrine which he once had. He was 
an old man, and he answered me, “ Youth 
is the time to believe, age is the time to 
trust.’ Now I am myself an old man, and 
more than ever | feel the wisdom of this 
saying. There are many things that I doubt, 
but few that I deny; where I cannot believe, 
there I often trust; and as all faith is mys- 
tical, I would have the bereaved trust their 
mystical experiences for much truth which 
they cannot afhrm. In their darkness it will 


5 


Ju After Days 


be strange if there are no gleams of that 
outer light which wraps our whole ignorance 
of this life. These will penetrate it some- 
times in what seem preternatural experi- 
ences of the waking hours, and sometimes 
in visions of the night, which I would have 
the sorrower at least passively accept, or not 
positively refuse. Others can say that such 
visions, such dreams, are figments of the 
overwrought brain, but no one whose de- 
spair they have brightened will reject them. 
Whether they are natural or supernatural, 
they are precious; whether they are the 
effect of causes quite within ourselves, or are 
intimations to us from the source of all life 
that death too shall have an end somewhere, 
somehow, they are to be cherished and kept 
in the heart, and not cast out of it as idle 
and futile. ‘They may be the kaleidoscopic 
adjustment of our jarred and shattered being; 
they may be prismal rays of celestial light: 
who shall say from knowledge? What they 
oftenest involve is that reunion with the 
absent which the whole soul yearns and 
grieves for. Once more, while they last, we 
have our lost again; we clasp them and hold 


Qu After Days 


them to our hearts; we talk with them, face 
to face, and they tell us— 


“What and where they be.” 


When such dreams fade they leave us not 
so all disconsolate, and while their glamour 
lasts our darkened world is illumined from 
their radiant world. So it seems, and their 
elamour shall never wholly pass unless we 
will it, and misprize them. If we speak of 
them too freely they dim sooner; the effort 
to fix them in words is fatal to them, but 
if we keep them hushed in the secret of our 
abiding sorrow when it is no longer agony, 
they will remain a lasting comfort. In the 
hour of “sharpest pathos,” I would say: 
Seek the help that offers itself to your seek- 
ing from those sources of healing which all 
the generations of Christianity have known. 
Go to your Bible, which, perhaps from your 
long estrangement, will have grown newly 
potent and significant; go to Plato for the 
converse which Socrates held with his weep- 
ing disciples when in the face of death he 
hailed the eternal life; go to the nobler poets, 
or to any poet in his nobler mood. It is not 


Qu After Days 


at random that I speak here of ‘Tennyson’s 
Two Voices and certain passages of In 
Memoriam. The very look and sound of 
the words had healing in them. I do not 
say that they were of the same quality of 
comfort as the affirmations of unquestion- 
ing faith; but often in the hour of grief the 
fabric of religion, which the whole of life has 
built up, crashes into the dust of death, 
which in its turn seems to resume the whole 
of life. [am speaking mainly to those whom 
this ruin befalls, and who cannot accept the 
assurance of others’ faith. These cannot 
dwell even upon the words of divine or 
apostolic promise and continue to find in 
them the hope and assurance which they 
once gave. Then nature must trust to 
nature, to dreams and visions, to the exalted 
poems, and take what comfort it can in them. 

Nature encompasses otherwise the whole 
of being, and she brings the anodyne, the 
narcotic, the nepenthe, in which the bereft 
are presently reprieved of their agony. ‘The 
house of mourning 1s in these transports the 
house of mirth; the time to weep is also the 


time to laugh. Amid their sobs a wild gayety 
8 


Ju After Days 


suddenly bursts from the mourners as if it 
burst upon them; it passes, and then the 
burdened heart relieves itself again in tears. 
I would not have the mourners strive to re- 
press these outbursts, as something unworthy 
and unfit. They are the effect of nature 
offering escape from otherwise intolerable 
pain, and beginning in the very presence of 
death the consolation which time will com- 
plete. Often they come through the unin- 
vited remembrance of something quaint or 
droll in the character of the dead, and so 
far from involving slight or irreverence they 
imply the share of the absent in the transport 
of that moment for which the living deny 
death. For that moment the dead are with 
us again in the fond and familiar intimacy 
_ of custom not then sensibly broken forever; 
they are more tenderly dear because they 
seem to return among us in the intimacy of 
love and home. 

These reliefs I urge the more because they 
are from within ourselves, and I would not 
have any one reject them, the most mystical 
of them, for the reason that they are from 
within us. If “the light is within you,” it is 

9 


Ou After Days 


not the light for your guidance alone, but the 
light for your solace also. For those whose 
faith is broken by the blow dealt, or is weak 
from long disuse, here is comfort from which 
it would be folly to turn. Doubtless the su- 
preme comfort can come, waiting the effect 
of time, only from the authority of revela- 
tion, by the mouth of the priest, or by the 
mouth of some strongly believing friend. It 
will not matter what church the priest is of, 
‘+ will not matter how poor and ignorant and 
humble the friend is; it is enough if either 
be sincere. There is help for the bereaved 
from the church, perhaps because the church 
has been the help of so many in so many 
ages; it is strengthened for its office by the 
beaten and broken helplessness of the myri- 
ads who have turned sorrowing to it; their 
tears and cries have consecrated it as they 
have consecrated the written Word. But so 
is there help from the living faith incarnate 
in some believer who takes the groping hand 
in the strong grasp of his confident trust and 
leads the way. 

There is relief, there is help, there is even 
hope in the testimony, which will come from 

10 


Su After Bays 


all sides, to the kindnesses that the dead did 
when living, and I would have the mourners 
give the freest access to this testimony. It 
will have been a life so hard and sterile as 
to be all but impossible if some deed of 
beneficence has not fallen from it in its way 
through the world, and such a life there will 
be few or none to grieve for when it is ex- 
tinct. All other lives will have left the re- 
membrance of good actions forgotten by the 
doer, but not forgotten by those they were 
done to. ‘These will gladly come with their 
remembrance, and there can be nothing 
sweeter to the sorrowing than such a proof 
that their dead are worthy of their grief. 
If there is to their grief any high or any 
humble, as indeed there should not be, in a 
time rapt from the world and the pride of 
life, then the last shall be first with them, 
and the lowliest whom their lost one has 
made his friend shall be the welcomest. No 
such friend should be kept from them by a 
foolish decorum; he has a right to tell them, 
and it is the right of the dead that he should 
tell them of the goodness he has experienced. 

1 suppose that we have all sometimes 

2 II 


Jn After Days 


shrunk from speaking or writing a word of 
compassion to the mourners in the house of 
death, but this is from a false and mistaken 
forbearance, I think. We know that we shall 
write inadequately, awkwardly, foolishly, per- 
haps; but we ought to know that the grati- 
tude of the bereaved will supply our defects. 
They wish to dwell upon every aspect of his 
vanished life in the sight of those who knew 
him, or only saw him, even. They instinc- 
tively long to keep his “loved idea” before 
their eyes as it is reflected in the eyes of 
others, and I believe those would err who 
should try to distract them from their grief, 
at least in the first days of it. Let them 
abandon themselves to it; do not seek to 
part them from it; if any chance does so, 
they will feel lifelong that they have not 
grieved their heartbreak out, that they have 
somehow been robbed of the sorrow which 
is one of the most precious experiences of 
love. Again, in all this, there is something 
mystical, and we cannot follow anguish in 
the ways by which it best assuages itself. 

I would have those who grieve keep close 
and fast every association with the dead; 

12 


Ou After Days 


soon enough such memories will pale and 
fade away. I would have them think of the 
faults of those who are gone, the foibles, the 
frailties, which in every human being help 
to make up his sum, and endear him equally 
with his virtues. If there is a world beyond 
this, these will go with him to it, and be- 
come the stuff of his regeneration and re- 
demption. I would have the mourners re- 
call hours of gladness, of merriment, spent 
with the dead, and live over with them in 
a joyous comradery, joyous, if only for a 
fleeting instant, the times which time cannot 
bring again. It may be that there 1s— 


“Nessun maggior dolore 
Che il ricordarsi del tempo felice 
Nella miseria.” 


But though it is— 


“Truth the poet sings 
That a sorrow’s crown of sorrows is remembering 


happier things,” 


yet if we empty memory of all but the gloomy 
and piteous experiences of the past we in- 
vite despair and madness. It zs a great 
spe id 


In After Days 


anguish to recall the happy time in wretch- 
edness, but it is also a great help, a ereat 
defence. Except rarely, except improbably, 
sorrow does not kill, for sorrow is something 
nobler than mere brooding upon irreparable 
loss; that indeed may kill, or, worse yet, 
craze. Sorrow is patient, sorrow is even 
cheerful, and willing to give itself to the 
trouble, the affliction of others. It is eager 
to share another grief in which it will lose 
itself, and if there is a counsel of consolation 
which I would offer above all the rest to the 
mourner it would be to seek out in the very 
ecstasy of pathos some instance of affliction 
and minister to it. 

Religion will help, reason will help, love 
will help, but only time will truly bring re- 
lief. It will seem a hard saying, in the black 
hour from which there is no visible issue, to 
declare from the universal human experience 
that there will yet be the full light of the 
common day in the house of mourning; it 
will seem profanation, almost, it will seem 
sacrilege. Yet it is true; and the light of 
the common day is the very light of heaven. 
The time will come when you shall not in- 

14 


Su After Days 


Se Se 
deed forget your dead, but when they shall 
be helpfully, not hurtfully, with you. The 
passion, the wild, headlong, hopeless passion 
for reunion with them, will have resolved 
itself into a patience in which they will al- 
ways be present, and responsive to your 
thought, which, whenever it strays from your 
work or your play, will seem to find them 
quietly grateful for it. You will not forget. 
You may no longer see the mystical beauty, the 
sublimity of the dead face, but out of the far- 
ther past the living eyes will look, and now and 
then, among the myriad faces, infinitely unlike 
one another, there will chance a face from 
which an evanescent semblance will flash a 
radiance into the place where her face, his face, 
is in your heart and restore it to your vision. 

Is it a freak of fleeting fancy, is it an 
effect of the eternal truth? ‘Tell us, tell 
us,’ sorrow implores, “‘shall we see that face 
again, and see it always? If a man die, 
shall he live again?’ ‘There is no answer 
in science or experience, only the voice 
of One who taught as if with authority, 
“If it were not so I would have told you.” 

I would have the mourners grieve all their 


15 


In After Days 


sorrow out, and not stay from dwelling on 
their loss; without fully realizing this, they 
cannot begin to retrieve it. “Keep before 
you,’ I would conjure them, “the vision of 
the face, the form, you shall see no more on 
earth, and let it pass only of itself, hoping, 
longing for its return when it fades away. 
But do not frame this image from the mem- 
ories of the dead in their hours of sickness, 
or even in the hours after pain when they take 
on the majesty and beauty of eternal peace. 
Those hours are but as instants in the long 
tale of the years that went before. Return 
in your tenderness, turn again in your de- 
spair, to the records of those happier years, 
and reconstruct from them the truer likeness 
of your beloved. See him gay and glad, full 
of life and purpose, of work and play, of jest 
and earnest, such as he veritably was, and 
do not wrong him by the presentment of his 
suffering or its mortal surcease. Make him 
your own again, by putting this out of your 
thoughts, and inviting into them the sem- 
blance of him when his life was the habit of 
your own, and he was most himself in some 


fortunate, some joyous moment.” 
16 


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recat eek ae RES AN pees 
ina ' en en | at 2 5 > i . iy Mids ~ & 


ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS 


Che Great Hope 
Elizabeth Sinart Phelps 


I] 
Che Great Hnpe 


“rT“HE setting of a great hope is like the 
setting of the sun.” 

The familiar words of one who was ac- 
quainted with grief, and who held its solemn 
charter of expression, recur to you as an 
event hitherto unmet. Your own event has 
transposed as it has transformed every other. 
Feeling and fact pass under the most relent- 
less autocracy in the world—the government 
of sorrow. You know your first great be- 
reavement. 

To say that it stuns you is to use the only 
verb that expresses the opening effect of 
your personal tragedy. Many of the words 
which anguish has chosen for its outcry from 
the beginning of pain to the end of peace 
cannot be replaced. We may chafe under 
their familiarity, and call them time-worn, 


1D 


Jn After Bays 


but we can never call them time-dishonored. 
The most averse of us will find them on our 
lips, or in our hearts, in the great crises of 
life. ‘This is one of such words. You are 
stunned, we say, by what has befallen you. 
At first, you do not even ache under it. 
Your subterranean consciousness perceives 
the fact, but of its relation to your capacity 
for suffering you know, at the beginning, no 
more than you do of the literature of Mars. 

The instinct of all hurt animals is much 
the same. You crawl to some mercifully 
desolate spot. As the key snaps in your 
door a deeply imbedded nerve in you seems 
to start with it. This is the nerve of the 
conscious pang. 

Outside the window there is silent space. 
There are hills and sky. There is light, and 
the diminution of light, and the formation of 
shadow in places where light was. Stupidly 
semi-conscious of familiar outlines, and yield- 
ing to the eternal human impulse to seek the 
horizon, you turn half-blind eyes to the 
gleaming west. The sun is going down. 
Color masses against color, like tints never 
seen before upon a shrinking palette. You 

20 


Jn After Bays 


do not recognize the familiar, daily incident. 
It whirls before you like the movement of 
earthquake or volcano or flood—something 
unnatural and incredible; there is a moment 
when it seems to be preposterous. ‘This is 
followed by a sense of fear which, it occurs 
to you, will in some form last forever. The 
sun has dipped, has dwindled, has blurred, 
has swung into a solemn twilight, has plunged 
to an impenetrable night—the first upon a 
new-closed grave. Into this strait and nar- 
row darkness you enter as your dead has 
entered—you are almost as separate, you 
are almost as alone. At first you are still. 
For a time you are as cold. 


Sensation returns not like that after par- 
alysis, tingling slowly, but like that after cer- 
tain concussions, with sudden smart. All the 
aching forces of the universe seem to have 
crashed upon you. It is as if you had be- 
come the central nerve of pain. The hap- 
less self-concentration of a first grief pos- 
sesses you; nor, in the healthier conditions 
of a slowly acquired peace will you recall it 
with anything but honest pity, such as you 

21 


Jn After Days 


would feel for another’s woe or error, or for 
inexperience in any form. Time teaches. 
The recurring seasons lift. The daily routine 
sustains. “The hours are too strong for 
you.” A sane philosophy—or even a live 
religion, if you are so fortunate as to have 
one—comes to your relief, if not altogether 
to your rescue. When you have found that 
you can bear your misery as the rest of the 
race have borne theirs before you—when you 
discover that you need not curse God and 
die, because your personal happiness is 
counted out of the system of things—then 
you are ready to confront your fate and ask 
it questions. If these are the questions of 
the rack to the inquisition, call them by their 
dark names; for nothing is gained by ignor- 
ing the first blasphemies of grief. Admit 
them, if they exist. Endure, if so it be, as 
vigorously as you suffer. Writhe, since you 
must. Curse, if you would. Anything is 
better than a paralytic despair. Be true, 
even to your manias, in the process of healing. 
Sanity never comes of self-deception. It 
comes of candor, as much as it comes of 
struggle. ‘The unreason of a great grief 
22 


Ju After Days 


passes into the mental health of acceptance 
by a beautiful and subtle process in which 
God and the soul work together—the soul 
never knowing how, but conscious sometime, 
in some way, in part or in full, of a Power 
not itself, that makes for comfort. 


I know of but two things in the experience 
of a real bereavement which cannot be borne; 
and I do not hesitate to say that it is asking 
too much of any sensitive human spirit to 
demand that they should be borne—at least, 
without the throes and blows of a rebellion 
which may be as creditable to a broken heart 
as what we call resignation; ‘or may, in fact, 
in the end, lead to that strong condition 
which we are apt to dismiss from our respect 
as a pious and feeble fallacy; until we our- 
selves have experienced it. 

He is a fortunate mourner who finds his 
sorrow unhaunted by spectres darker than 
itself. Remorse is the one worst, the one 
intolerable element in affliction. Blessed be- 
yond his own knowledge is he who finds him- 
self companioned only by gentle memories of 
his dead: he to whom the acutest pangs pos- 


23 


Jn After Dayz 


sible to grief are strangers: he whose love for 
the living, like the love of the New Testa- 
ment definition, was ‘“‘kind,’ while it had 
the opportunity. 

There is no more pitiable being in the 
world than a man who, really loving, or real- 
ly believing that he loved, yet inflicted upon 
the living—perhaps in the fire of anger, or 
perhaps in the froth of thoughtlessness— 
that for which he cannot ask the pardon 
of the dead. The hurt may have been slight, 
if you choose to call it so, but it takes on a 
mortal character in the retrospect. There 
was a duel of natures or a war of words; 
there was an hour stained with red which 
has dyed the memory through and through; 
they who loved became as they who hated— 
and wounds slashed where caresses had been; 
and perhaps the dead forget, but the living, 
God pity him! remembers. 

The slow surprise of dear incredulous eyes; 
the sudden shocked sense of inconceivable 
pain—the mute reproach—the silence more 
surcharged than any outcry—these return 
and recur like the films in a limited and 
monotonous biograph. The memory sits 

24 


Su After Days 


bound hand and foot before moments which 
a man would give his life to forget. But, in 
proportion as he is a man, he does not forget. 
It does not matter very much that he may 
not have been altogether to blame, that his 
friend was, or was believed to be partly at 
fault, for now the only thing he does forget 
is that the loved and vanished was ever in 
the wrong. It is not the faults of the dead 
that we recall; it is our own. It is not our 
own lovable traits that we dwell upon; but 
theirs. ‘‘I have come to think of you,” said 
an aging man to a friend, “‘as never forget- 
ting, and always forgiving.” It is good to 
be given words like these while we can hear 
them. For the hour comes when there 1s 
nothing left for us to do but listen; when the 
whole being becomes one exquisite ear, like 
the curved body of Burne-Jones’ Eurydice in 
hell, entreating the eternal silence for articu- 
lation which does not come. The powerful 
and discordant Carlyle will be remembered 
no longer for his great history than he will 
be for his cry over the grave of the wife 
whose life he bruised while he had her: 
“Blind and deaf that we are: oh, think, 


25 


Ou After Days 


if thou yet love anybody living, wait not till 
Death sweeps down the paltry dust-clouds, 
and idle dissonances of the moment.” 

“Oh, why do we delay so much till Death 
makes it impossible ?” 

“Oh, my Dearest, my Dearest, that can- 
not now know how dear!’ 

Of all the thrilling incidents told us by the 
evangelist who moved Boston last winter, one 
will longest pursue us. 

A Maine fisherman lost his little girl in a 
fog. He left the child upon an island rock 
while he went to fish, and, fishing, forgot her. 
The tide was rising. With the tide came the 
fog. When at last he found his way back to 
the spot where he had left the little thing she 
had been swept away. To this day it is said 
that the disordered father reiterates these 
hapless words: 

“If T had only stayed where I could hear 
her cry!” 

Piteous the truth, but, like all truths, to 
be faced! The fogs of life crawl subtly be- 
tween those who love, and tides rise, and 
waves drown while we are having a pleasant 
time, and capable of forgetting. Then we 

26 


Qu After Days 


row back—desperately, out of our reckoning, 
and calling all the way. A little remember- 
ing, a little fidelity, a little steadiness or kind- 
ness would have made the dreadful differ- 
ence. Perhaps it is better to know this too 
late than never to know it at all; but in the 
bitter education of life there can be no crueler 
knowledge. If I had only stayed near 
enough to hear her cry! .. . If I had only 
kept close enough to hear him call! These 
are the self-reproaches which no self-delusion 
can silence. Nothing is so hard to bear as 
that which could have been prevented. 

After our first bereavement, who dares any 
longer drift beyond the range of drowning 
cries? In an utter sense, at a solemn cost, 
we learn to stand by those we love. 

It would be a waste of the emotional force 
to dwell upon the element of remorse in be- 
reavement, if it did not carry its own con- 
soling quality with it—and this, I think, in 
a peculiar way it does. Nothing is so sure 
as that love forgives. Although we love, we 
may hurt. In proportion as we are beloved, 
we shall be forgiven. What if we did harass 
him to the quick for whom we mourn? What 

| 3 ah 


Su After Days 


if we did wound her to the death for whom 
we grieve? In all the world of life or death, 
he would be the first—she would be the swift- 
est—to forget. It may be well “to have it 
out” with our haunted memories once for 
all, and trust the dearest dead, as we should 
have trusted the dear living to comfort us 
for the very wrong that we wrought upon 
themselves. 

It may be that no one else can do this. 
It may be that no one else would. He will, 
whose life you damaged. She will, whose 
heart you broke. Love will, because it is 
love. ‘There is no such thing as‘an unfor- 
giving spirit, if that spirit loves. Death does 
not make our beloved less trustworthy, less 
tender, or less true. Who shall say that the 
process of passing from this life to the other 
does not make them more so? In their way, 
they may develop under the separation as 
much as we do. In their consciousness, as 
in our own, the energies of love may intensify 
through parting. It is impossible to put a 
limit to the power of the dead—or the will of 
the dead—to forget that they were ever 
grieved or harmed. 

28 


Su After Days 


One of the supreme passages in all litera- 
ture is De Quincey’s apostrophe to the Bishop 
of Beauvais, who sentenced Joan of Arc. 
Ever since, a child in my father’s study, I 
first heard him read it while I sat listening 
“‘with a wild surmise,’ the words have il- 
luminated for me, like no others outside of 
Holy Writ, the nature of forgiveness; per- 
haps the nature of a living and therefore 
growing spirit: 

““My lord, have you no counsel? ‘Counsel 
I have none; in heaven above, or on earth 
beneath, counsellor there is none now that 
would take a brief from me.’ .. . Who is that 
cometh from Domrémey?. . . who is she that 
cometh with blackened flesh from walking 
the furnaces of Rouen? ‘This is she, the 
shepherd girl, counsellor that had none for 
herself, whom I choose, bishop, for yours. 
She it is, I engage, that shall take my lord’s 
brief. She it is, bishop, that would plead 
for you; yes, bishop, she—when heaven and 
earth are silent.” 


The only other unbearable thing that I 
know in the endurance of bereavement is the 
29 


Ju After Days 


apparent finality of it. Any temporary sepa- 
ration between the living can be borne. 
Which soul of us is not man enough to ac- 
cept our share of the universal doom, if it is 
not to be a permanent one? Who could not 
spare his beloved patiently, if he must, for a 
little while? Who could not wait for the 
touch of the vanished hand if, in the width 
of the spaces or the gulfs of the mysteries, it 
is groping anywhere for ours? He was right 
whose half-inspired, half-narcotized vision 
selected the sound of “‘everlasting farewells” 
as the epitome of human despair. Love 
claims in proportion to its intensity, and all 
genuine love defies the grave as a man fight- 
ing for his life defies his assailant. I incline 
to go so far as to say that, if we do not clasp 
our dead again beyond the barriers of their 
mystical silence, it is our own fault. 

It all comes, in the end, perhaps, to a mat- 
ter of feeling—profound and high-minded 
feeling. ‘The intellectual argument for per- 
sonal immortality is quite strong enough to 
cover the case. But it may not be supple 
enough, and the case may outrun it. By 
as much as love is greater than reason, there 

30 


Qn After Days 


remains the larger argument for the ever- 
lasting life. There are souls born doubters, 
as there are bodies born cripples, and there 
will always be a certain proportion of minds 
to which the sublimest promise of the Chris- 
tian faith is not sympatica, and therefore not 
comprehensible. One may look upon skeptics 
of the sneering and irremediable type as 
spiritual defectives. Honest they may be— 
pitiable they certainly are. One would go 
any length of sympathy with their misfort- 
une; but one cannot mistake deformity for 
health and beauty. Unbelief is not an en- 
viable thing; there is nothing grand or noble 
about it. Nothing can be more erroneous 
than to take it as a sign of intellectual su- 
periority. This is a common mistake of 
those who are either half-read, or half-felt 
in the study of spiritual questions. 


It is probable that there have been more 
words written to prove or disprove the doc- 
trine of personal immortality than have cen- 
tred upon any other subject of human 
thought—it is certain that there has been 
more thought expended upon it. Probably 

31 


Ju After Days 


all intelligent people have their own favorite 
method of approaching the question. To 
my own mind the intellectual argument— 
not philosophically, but simply speaking— 
may be summed in some such form as this: 

Life is a consequence, looking for a cause. 
The Creator is either a system of things or 
an individual force. In any case, He has 
eventuated in a world of individuals. ‘These 
feel, on the whole, more than they think, 
and suffer, on the whole, more than they 
enjoy. 

The preponderance of misery over happi- 
ness in the human race is so tragic that it 
constitutes the darkest mystery of creation. 
There is no solution of this mystery except 
in some form of reimbursement to the suf- 
fering. (This may not be theological, but it 
is logical, and I am not at all afraid to say 
it.) ‘The creating force is either good or evil, 
kind or cruel, and must act accordingly. The 
hypothesis of a malevolent Deity is intel- 
lectually perfectly coherent; but morally it 
is sO monstrous that it must be counted out 
of any cursory consideration like this. If we 
are in the control of benevolent power, we 


32 


Ju After Bays 


are entitled to expect benevolent treatment. 
If God is good, He will be kind. 

If God is kind, He could not make a world 
of woe like this one, and stop there—it is 
not that He would not, or should not—He 
could not. It would be the reductio ad ab- 
surdam of philosophy. It 1s perfectly con- 
ceivable that He might create a suffering 
world, for beneficent ends of His own, partly 
apparent even to us, even now and here— 
but only partly apparent. It ts as incon- 
ceivable that He should pack this planet with 
the agonies that it holds, if these are the be- 
ginning and end of the story, as it is that He 
should permit the sins and manias of the 
race, if there is never to be given an oppor- 
tunity to evolve into moral sanity. 

One may say it with reverence none the 
less profound for the courage of the words, 
that the character of Godhead itself is on 
trial in the history of this unfortunate world. 
Life is scarcely more than an experiment in 
vivisection, if death is the end of personality. 

Personality exists in proportion to power, 
and, of all personal forces, love, in this sys- 
tem of things, is the supreme agent. It is 

33 


Su After Days 


not sufficiently understood that love is its 
own god; capable of deciding for itself the 
question of immortality. As a man feels, so 
he is. As we love, so we are to be. It is to 
an appalling or a blessed extent for you to 
decree the nature of your future. If you love 
greatly, if you love utterly, if you love nobly— 
what power in the universe can decide that 
your love shall cease to be? I can conceive 
of none. It rests with yourself whether you 
shall love so highly that no low, material 
accident, like physical death, can slay your 
love. As long as love lives, it has the claims 
of an energy upon its source. It is easy for 
us to perceive that God is power. It is a 
slow lesson for us to understand that God 
is love. Perhaps it took the Christian 
Scriptures to give us the splendid epi- 
eram. 

Love, for most of us in this life, is at 
once a sad and glorious thing. We come to 
the brow of the grave with a little struggling 
shape of human happiness in our arms, and 
drop it there—buried alive. Still warm, 
breathing yet, palpitating to our lips, it slips 
under the earth, and cries after us as it slides 

34 


In After Days 


away: “I have not died. Save me! Save 
me, that I live again!” 

Too often, it should be remembered, we 
are the slayers of our own buried feeling. He 
who cannot love strongly, he who cannot love 
steadily, may live beyond death—we do not 
say that weak feeling, like weak thought, may 
not have its fair chance—but he who does not 
love sufficiently to insist upon another life, if 
only for love’s sake, may have missed his 
ablest advocate for personal immortality. 


Fidelity is the most uncertain of human 
traits. In this, dogs, are clearly the superiors 
of men. ‘The terrier to whom a monument 
is erected in Scotland because he slept upon 
his master’s grave every night, in all weathers, 
for twelve years, surpassed most mourners 
of the master race, in loyalty and in grief. 
If great and permanent love is, in itself, a 
prophecy of immortality—I anticipate the 
question—yes. The dog deserved another 
life, and I have no personal difficulty in sup- 
posing that he may have it, if any of us do. 

In the background of all thoughtful souls 
lurks one question which most of us evade, 

35 


In After Days 


but which none of us escape. The weakness 
of human feeling, the uncertain power to hold 
ourselves to “the highest when we see it,” is 
not so apparent or so perplexing in any other 
relation as in that between man and woman. 
Marriage is an attempt to fix this relation in 
its noblest form: but a noble spirit may fail 
in realizing the endeavor. The man who has 
loved his living wife devotedly may recoin 
the gold of feeling, “‘no matter whose the 
print, image, and superscription once” it 
“bore.” Human loneliness is the most in- 
exorable power this side of death, and all 
but the royal allegiances go down before it. 
In youth we are severe upon this affectional 
errancy. All young lovers believe in the 
eternity of love—their own, and that of others. 
In middle life and age we grow tolerant of 
far feebler weakness than that involved in the 
temporal quality of affection. Many a man’s 
heart has ached its way through the experi- 
ence of love and ties not his first, without 
coming to any ease in the direction of a future 
life. The perplexity is too fine for him— 
perhaps too sad. Fine it will always be, and 
sad it must remain. What is to become of 
36 


Su After Bays 


the cross-currents of feeling in the world to 
be? How adjust, in the new life, relations 
that are unadjustable here? Where shall we 
put the later love? How shall we face the 
old? What is there to be expected but an 
emotional and even an intellectual confusion 
which may deprive what we call heaven of 
one of its chief elements of peace or even 
comfort ? 

Only one thing seems to me possible to say 
—whatever we may think or feel—upon this 
matter. When we consider the adaptability 
of our affections here, we may infer some- 
thing of their amenability to unknown condi- 
tions hereafter. We love, or think we love; 
yet we love, or think we love again. Never- 
theless, there must exist the supreme feeling, 
or the composite ideal of feelings. Who shall 
gather this blossom of being? And how 
shall it be sown and grown? Jesus Christ 
spoke a wonderful and mystical word upon 
this matter. Pondering upon it, as every 
one must who has speculated much upon the 
future life, I have come to this conclusion: 
When we consider what time does for us, 
what growth does for us, what character does, 


37 


In After Days 


and experience, in this world—it is not neces- 
sary to fret ourselves about the affectional 
dénouements of the next. 

Take the single fact of human friendship. 
What capacities in it! What evolutions from 
it! What revelations, what atonements, what 
prophecies! He who has found a friend, or 
proved one, may be for that reason farther 
on the way toward the life everlasting than 
he supposes. 

But he who loves nobly and is nobly be- 
loved has stepped already across the invisi- 
ble and magical border. Who knows but 
that love in another world may partake of 
some of the firmer qualities of friendship in 
this one? While still it may not lose its 
own essence, exquisite and ineffable, its wan- 
dering soul which goes clamoring here for 
immortality like an orphaned child for a 
home. 


But the mourner at the new grave does 
not concern himself with the impermanence 
of human feeling. He is not troubled lest 
he should cease to love. He is busied only 
with trying to bear his power of loving. Yes- 

38 


ie ee ee ee ee 


On After Days 


terday, to-day, and forever, his need of his 
dead seems to him the supreme fact of life. 
As he kneels in the grass to plant flowers 
above dust too precious to be neglected, he 1s 
planting solemn and exacting hopes in his 
nature; these have deep roots, and, like other 
rooted things, they will blossom if they are 
cherished. 

Because he loves and grieves, he believes 
in the life everlasting—and, so long as he 
loves, and believes, he has reason to expect 
it. Somewhere, somehow—his idea of the 
where or the how is vague, but so is mist, 
and like amber mist at the setting of a slant 
sun, this clings to him—at some time, and 
for some reason, he dreams that he shall 
clasp the dear dead thing that he has laid 
away. Let him dream, and bless God that 
he can. 

If it were but a vision of the darkness, who 
would awaken him? For there is no fact on 
this earth so actual as that dream. ‘There is 
no argument so powerful as that hope. There 
is no philosophy so blessed as that belief. 
Nay, more than this—I would rather believe 
that I should find my lost and loved again, 

39 


In After Days 


and be mistaken about it, if that were pos- 
sible, than to believe that the grave were the 
end of hope and faith, of happiness and com- 
fort, of love and loyalty; and then learn, 
after all, that these precious things would 
live as long as I live, and last as long 
as I love; and that the spirits of my dead 
would turn to me in the end, the patient, 
hurt faces of the loving and the slighted. 
Whether it be a truth or a soul, that 
which we value must be cherished to be 
held. 

Love (as I have elsewhere said, if I may 
be allowed to say again) is not a sketch, but 
a serial story; it runs on past this life “to be 
continued”’ in the next; or else there should 
have been no story at all. Better to live and 
die blank and bleak of heart, than to ex- 
perience the ecstasies and agonies of any real 
affection, and stand quivering to see death 
cut the chapters off midway and forever. The 
Author of the greatest tale told in all the uni- 
verse is an Artist; and He will complete His 
work. ‘This is our reasonable hope, and, if 
it were not, we who live by it, and would die 
for it, are of all men most miserable. Pos- 

40 


Qu After Bays 


sessing it, we should be, of all, the hap- 
piest. 

If death is treated as an incident—separa- 
tion as an episode—reunion as a prospect— 
grief can be borne as a momentary interrup- 
tion to an eternal joy. 


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JOHN BIGELOW 


Is Chere 
Existence After Death? 


John Bigelow 


III 


Qs There Existence After Death? 


I 


LAWYER would naturally say, in an- 

swer to this question, that the burden 
of proof lies upon those who deny the con- 
tinuity of life. He might then ask what the 
contestant means by Death. If told, “the 
change undergone when our soul or spirit 
is separated from our bodies,” as we are 
bound to presume he would, he may fairly be 
answered that such separation no more signi- 
fies a termination of life than the falling of 
the leaves in winter connotes the death of the 
trees. The material body is only a transi- 
tory abode of Life; no more Life itself than 
the garments with which we clothe it; than 
a stove crammed with burning coals is any 

45 


Jn After Days 


part of the heat which the coals assist in 
generating and the stove in radiating. 

All the constituents of a man on this 
planet are Material or Spiritual; what of us 
is not material is spiritual, and what is not 
spiritual is material. But matter has no 
element or attribute capable either of pro- 
ducing or of maintaining life. Though some 
motion of all the atoms of all matter is a 
consequence or incident of every variation of 
temperature; though this variation is inces- 
sant; though chemical and polar variation 
is also incessant; though the diurnal and 
annual motions of the earth are perpetu- 
ally changing the position of every atom 
of our planet—yet no atom or multiple of 
atoms has a power of its own either to initi- 
ate or to suspend motion. Hence matter 
cannot be fatigued. If it could be, it could 
and would waste, shrink in bulk, and finally 
perish. But the scales of the chemist have 
effectually disposed of the delusions so long 
entertained of the destructibility of matter. 
The conception of its diminution or anni- 
hilation is now as absurd as would be the 


conception of its birth from nothing, 
46 


Jn After Days 


When, therefore, what is commonly called 
Death separates the Soul from Body, Spirit 
from Matter, and “this corruptible puts on 
incorruption,” matter does not part with a 
single attribute or quality necessary to its 
perpetuity or integrity. It continues as be- 
fore to undergo changes in obedience to 
forces which do not belong to it and over 
which ‘t has no control whatever. It continues 
incapable of diminishing or of increasing 
itself, whatever may be the process or force to 
- which it may be subjected. 

In parting with my body, therefore, | shall 
merely have parted with a transient imple- 
ment as destitute of life as a spade or a 
plough, or Franklin’s kite, by which he 
dragged the lightning from the heavens, 
though not a spark of the lightning was in 
the kite itself. 

As the matter of which our body is com- 
posed is without any initiative; utterly life- 
less; does not die; cannot be killed; cannot 
even diminish;—where is the life of which 
the body was for so long a faithful and obe- 
dient servant, it being no longer a part or 
tenant of the body? It must be somewhere. 

47 


Gn After Days 


It cannot have gone with the body into 
loam, for loam, of course, has no more life 
than the body from which it is dissolved. 
As the Life never was a part of the loam, and 
therefore could not have gone with the body 
into loam, it must be presumed to be, what 
it was before the separation, a spiritual sub- 
stance or entity, and to have passed on into 
the state or existence in which enfranchised 
spirits must be presumed to have been gath- 
ered from time immemorial. 


It 


Man’s incarnation was necessary to qualify 
him to profit by the educational opportuni- 
ties of what we call his earthly life and en- 
vironment. But as in this our earthly en- 
vironment or kindergarten, our children are 
left by the parents at school only for so long 
a time as they think may prove most advan- 
tageous to them, so are we detained by or 
discharged from our carnal bonds when we 
have received from them all that we are likely 
to receive to our advantage, or perhaps also 

48 


Qu After Days 


when temptations greater than we might 
prove able to successfully contend with 
threaten us. 

But such separated Life is not visible to 
the natural eyes of the terrestrial man, 
Neither is it ever actually visible to him in 
the flesh. The natural eye only sees in any 
man what is spiritual in him as reflected from 
his features, gestures, language, and behavior. 
These, however, are all only spiritual im- 
pressions, as purely such even while in the 
flesh as they will be when separated from it, 
however much more accurate they may be 
presumed to become when the observed shall 
be relieved from the many worldly tempta- 
tions to appear other than what they are. 
Everything we love and everything we hate, 
every virtue and every vice, is spiritual and 
only spiritual. Every man may become more 
or less charitable or selfish, liberal or avari- 
cious, loyal or treacherous, just or unjust, 
but neither the one nor the other has ever 
been or can ever become more or less than 
the precise spiritual quantities their names 
imply. Whenever we undertake to describe 
another person, the only characteristics that 


49 


Gn After Bays 


we remember and feel are those which when 
reduced to their ultimate ratio inspire us with 
more or less of esteem or of the reverse, 
—all purely spiritual impressions. Hence the 
Christian, in what is known as the Dominical 
prayer, does not say to God, “Be Thou 
hallowed,” which would seem most natural, 
but “Hallowed be Thy Name” (and all 
through the Bible, praise and service are of- 
fered to God’s name, not directly to Him), 
for the obvious reason that it would be a 
mockery to pray for the sanctification of the 
Infinite, whom we can never hope fully to 
comprehend, and of whose attributes our es- 
timates are liable to change every year— 
nay, every day—of our lives. We can only 
pray without profanity that the Name, which 
represents to each of us only what he actually 
does know or thinks he knows of God, may 
be sanctified or hallowed, that and nothing 
more. I'he Name changes to our eyes in 


value in perfect correspondence with the in- _ 


crease or the decrease of our knowledge of 

God. So it does also with that of all our 

fellow-creatures. Hence, however devout we 

may be, it is possible that, though the Almighty 
50 


ee 
Ce eee ae 


; 


Su After Bays 


is unchangeable, we may never pray twice 
to precisely the same God. 


III 


All of life consists of what we love and of 
what we do not love. ‘There are no hopes, 
aspirations, ambitions, or interests animat- 
ing the heart of man which do not resolve 
themselves into one or both of these cate- 
gories. Whatever, therefore, we do is done 
in obedience to our Will, which represents 
what we most love or do not love, or what we 
are compelled by circumstances for the time 
being to most love or not love. Yet both 
Love and Will are purely spiritual causes. 
Whatever is done at their behest by the in- 
carnate man are only effects. Matter, the 
slave of man, we have seen, is itself im- 
mortal. Could anything be more prepos- 
terous than to assume that this Master 
dies at the grave and the Slave lives on for- 
ever! 

But it may be said that matter is immortal 
only as matter and on this planet or planets 


AY 


Su After Days 


like this. How does it follow that the Spirit 
which has deserted its containment, or has 
been deserted by it, has survived? 

The proper answer to this question is sim- 
ply to state what that Spirit loved or hated. 
Do we love any or all of what are commonly 
regarded as virtues—temperance, patience, 
truth, justice, benevolence, charity, modesty, 
humility—or do we more affect the opposites 
of some or all of these virtues? If either, 
they are our life and they are all spiritual. 
As none of these virtues or their opposite 
vices can ever be less virtues and vices, of 
course, therefore, they are immortal. All of 
us may become more or less temperate, chari- 
table, humble, or truthful, but temperance, 
charity, humility, and truthfulness can never 
become more or less virtues. 

Once, some fifty years ago, I woke from 
a deep sleep with so fresh a recollection of a 
dream, the quality of which had never be- 
fore entered my mind so far as I could 
recollect, and which was so vivid that I was 
able when I arose to go to my library and 
record it in my diary. It is not inappropri- 
ate, I think, to insert here: 

52 


Ju After Days 


“The human mind can conceive of no time 
when 2+2 began to be 4 or will cease to be 4. 
It never could have been nor can it ever be other- 
wise. 

“God is infinite truth. The above result is 
necessarily a part of God, because it is a neces- 
sary part of infinite truth. To suppose a power 
of denying that 2+2 make 4 is to suppose a 
power of denying all truth, which is not sup- 
posable.” 


In other words, God is a state or Com- 
position of all the qualities necessary to 
perfection, and which, like a mathematical 
axiom, never could be more or less at any 
time. 


IV 


There are several other questions which 
should be answered before there will be any 
occasion for the believer in a future existence 
to take the witness-stand. 

Ours is the only species of the animal 
kingdom that is never satisfied with what at 
any moment it is, has been, or has done. Its 


53 


Su After Bays 


successes are regarded practically as but steps 
to a higher plane. We are always struggling 
to accumulate power; whether in the form 
of health, of strength, of knowledge, of ex- 
perience, of skill, of wealth, of popular es- 
teem or influence. The passion to better 
our state or position, to accumulate more of 
something that we value, is an emotion which 
distinguishes us more than any other species 
of the animal kingdom, and animates us to 
the very close of our earthly life. To this 
passion Shakespeare puts into the mouth of 
Hamlet this masterly expression: 


“What is a man 
If his chief good and market of his time 
Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more. 
Sure, he that made us with such large dis- 
course, 
Looking before and after, gave us not 
That capability and godlike reason 
To fust in us unused. Now, whether it be 
Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple 
Of thinking too precisely on the event, 
A thought which, quarter’d, hath but one part 
wisdom 
And ever three parts coward, I do not know 


54 


Su After Days 


Why yet I live to say, “This thing’s to do’; 

Sith I have cause and will and strength and 
means 

To do’t. Examples gross as earth exhort me.” 


What pretext or excuse can be made for the 
creation of a planet—not to say an incal- 
culable number of planets—and_ stocking 
ours with creatures whose environment is 
specially calculated to fit them to become 
purer, wiser, and better than they ever do 
become while incarnate, and yet who are 
always impelled by desires which result in 
more or less successful struggles to become 
purer, wiser, better, or in some way, at least 
in their own eyes, more important? Surely 
such a life,if terminating at the grave, can 
only be regarded as but a fragment, as only 
a page of the great volume of a human life, 
as only the atrium of one of God’s noblest 
temples. What possible reason can be as- 
signed for even suspecting that this trend of 
development should not go on indefinitely, 
only far more rapidly when separated as it 
would be from what was never a part of it, 
what shall have ceased to be even a con- 


55 


Ju After Days 


venience to it, and threatens to become an 
obstruction only avoided by a separation 
from it? 


Vv 


During the last century physical science 
made marvellous contributions to man’s pow- 
er over previously latent forces in nature. 
One of not the least significant consequences 
has been to give the captains of industry 
wealth, rank, and social position such as they 
had never before enjoyed in any age, in 
strange contrast with their position when 
Plato denounced the study of mathematics 
as beneath the dignity of a philosopher. 
From the bench of their newly acquired 
social eminence these scientists have rashly 
proclaimed that the wise man could accept 
nothing as true but what could be demon- 
strated by the unaided human reason. ‘The 
natural corollary of this dogma is that what 
the scientists do not know is unworthy of 
belief. However, it exactly suits that enor- 
mous proportion of the human family which 
worship idols made with hands. It also 

56 


Su Afier Days 


naturally inspires them with profound respect 
for the scientist who gives the highest possible 
sublunary sanction of their worship of idols 
of silver and gold. What better authority 
was needed than such fashionable Rationalists 
as Tyndall, Herbert Spencer, and Wallace 
to countenance the worship of this world for | 
what there is in it; in putting the Bible 
away on the upper shelves of the library as 
“mere literature”; in leaving the Church to 
such victims of superstition as were not sufh- 
ciently enlightened to see the absurdity of 
its pretensions to a divine origin, and devot- 
ing their Sabbaths to automobile excursions, 
to games of ball, tennis, or bridge; and finally 
to the conversion of all churches into lecture- 
rooms or music-halls? They now had not 
only scientific but fashionable authority for 
saying, “Prove to me by inexorable logic that 
there is a God, that He inspired the Bible, 
that there is a life beyond the grave, and 
prove it by the same inexorable logic as New- 
ton proved the attraction of gravitation, then, 
perhaps, I will believe in your God, frequent 
His temple, respect His Sabbath, and pre- 
pare myself for your imaginary future life. 
57 


Qu After Days 


Till then you can expect nothing of the kind 
from reasonable creatures.” 

It never occurs to any of these short-sighted 
Pharisees, wise as they fancy themselves to 
be, that none of their scientific authorities, 
however eminent, has ever been able to 
demonstrate the absolute truth of any one 
of the sciences they profess, or has ever 
reached the frontiers of any science whatever. 

Sir Isaac Newton enjoys the reputation 
of having discovered a law which controls 
the greatest amount of power or force of 
which the scientist pretends to have any con- 
ception. The tradition is that while rest- 
ing under an apple-tree in his garden an 
apple fell upon his head. In searching for 
the reason why the apple had fallen, and 
why others, becoming detached from the tree, 
fell also to the ground, while none of them 
fell upward or sideways, he wisely concluded 
that they must have obeyed some superior 
force that made them fall to a lower level 
rather than in other directions. Lacking 
knowledge of the real cause of this propen- 
sity of apples as well as of most other things 
unsupported to descend, he named the force 

58 


Su After Days 


they obeyed Attraction of Gravitation, a 
phrase or title which had no more meaning 
than the X Y Z of an algebraic formula. If 
it signified anything more than a “sound 
and fury,” it stood in his equation as the 
representative of some power of which he 
only knew that it makes things unsupported 
fall to the level of a lower support. 

Newton had yet to learn that man can 
only know what has happened and its dert- 
vates, but never knows, only conjectures, 
~ what may happen from what has happened. 
Newton presumed from what he had ob- 
served of the habits of apples and other 
things, that all material things would con- 
tinue to fall unless supported. This pre- 
sumption from the orderliness of nature was 
not science, but Faith. All causes imply the 
exercise of some Will and all Will is spiritual. 
All causes, therefore, are spiritual and have 
to be inferred by the scientist from their re- 
sulting phenomena. ‘The experience of every 
creature is illustrated in the answer which 
Moses received when he said to our Cre- 
ator, 

“T pray Thee, if I have found grace in 

5 59 


Ou After Days 


Thy sight, show me now Thy ways that I 
may know Thee.’ The Lord replied: 

“Thou canst not see My face: for man 
shall not see Me and live. Behold, there is a 
place by Me, and thou shalt stand upon the 
rock: and it shall come to pass, while My 
glory passeth by, that I will put thee in a 
cleft of the rock, and will cover thee with 
My hand until I have passed by: and I will 
take away Mine hand: and thou shalt see 
My back: but My face shall not be seen.” 

In other words, our Creator, the Causa 
Causans (the Supreme Will), is a spirit and 
cannot be seen by man while in a state of 
nature—that is, while in the bonds of the 
flesh. As the Cause of Causes, the Active in 
every phenomenon, is spiritual, Moses could 
see it only after it had passed: in other words, 
by results. He saw only its back, as the sci- 
entist sees phenomena and from them in- 
fers their Causes as best he can. HE SEEs 
THE REAL OR FINAL CAUSE OF NOTHING. 
Only the infinite can see or be seen by the 
infinite. 

The Baron of Verulam was a great philos- 
opher, and as such he is justly famous, but 

60 


Qu After Dayz 


his fame as a philosopher rests entirely upon 
the popularization of the lesson to which we 
have referred, and which Moses received 
while in the cleft of the rock on the Mount, 
thousands of years ago. Bacon taught men 
to infer as much as they could of the laws 
of their Creator from facts observed, from 
events that had occurred, instead of trying 
to infer facts from imaginary laws and jejyune 
presumptions. He taught the scientist to 
search for wisdom and observation from the 
results evolved by experiment and observa- 
tion and to trust no conclusions about the 
Creator’s work adopted before the Creator 
had passed by. 

The results of the Science of the Ration- 
alist at best are but hypotheses, the possible 
fragments of a truth, but in no sense abso- 
lute truth. They are vessels of which any 
man may drink, but none of them are like 
Joseph’s “cup, with which he divineth,” 
We infer that the sun that disappears this 
evening will reappear the following morn- 
ing, but that is not the conclusion, but only 
an inference of science. The inference that 


the sun will reappear to-morrow is Faith, 
61 


Sn After Bays 


without which the scientist is as blind as the 
beast that perisheth, for neither can demon- 
strate the truth of what is not. That can 
be rendered even probable only by Faith, 
which, as the Apostle Paul, with scientific 
accuracy, said to the Hebrews, “‘is the as- 
surance of things hoped for; the proving of 
things not seen. For therein the elders had 
witness borne to them. By faith we under- 
stand that the worlds have been framed by 
the Word of God, so that what is seen hath - 
not been made out of things which do 
appear.” 

But Faith is not material, but spiritual, 
and what advantageth it a man to know 
what has been, without the faculty of 
trusting at discretion upon the consecutive 
relations of events and the probable conse- 
quences? 

In what respect, then, ought our faith in 
sunshine to-morrow to differ from our faith 
in the continuity of life after parting with 
its earthly garments? We cannot demon- 
strate, neither can we deny either, while for 
both there is every probability and for neither 
any demonstrable improbability. 

62 


Jn After Days 


VI 


It is the manifest purpose, end, or function 
of the scientist to search for and disclose the 
mysteries of the earth he inhabits and depends 
upon for his subsistence. As his disclosure of 
these mysteries increases, what is more natural 
than that his dominion over spiritual forces 
should also be more abundantly disclosed to 
or by him, pari passu? All nations and tribes, 
whether civilized or savage, recognize in their 
fellows as virtues charity, honesty, gener- 
osity, temperance, patience, diligence in one’s 
calling, obedience to legitimate authority, 
courage in doing what we think right and 
just. All these qualities without exception 
are such as contribute to happiness in this 
world, and are all parts of every religion, 
whether Christian or Gentile. The veriest 
thief, liar, reprobate, or outcast of whatever 
shade, expects from others nothing more or 
better than each and all of those virtues and 
many others. He respects every one who 
has them, and denounces their absence from 
every one but himself. But every one of 
those qualities and every one of their oppo- 

63 


Sn After Days 


sites are spiritual. In dropping or shedding 
his material garments he experiences no sub- 
stantial change or privation. He remains 
precisely the same man after his heart has 
ceased to beat as before. He has experi- 
enced no change but the removal of the 
checks to his spontaneity. He may now orat- 
ify all his dominant desires, appetites, and 
wishes without the prompt penalties of ex- 
cess against which, in his earthly life, he was 
wont to be providentially warned. As he 
has parted at the grave with nothing which 
constituted any part or quality of his life, 
his course of life is not even interrupted. 
On the contrary, he is presumably far more 
alive than ever, as his will is emancipated 
from all earthly restrictions to its gratification. 

These are all logical presumptions from all 
his earthly experience. ‘To suppose that his 
life, therefore, terminates at the erave would 
be not a particle less absurd than to infer 
from a frost in December that your garden 
would never yield strawberries again. Hence 
every Rationalist professes to have less faith 
than every gardener may be presumed act- 
ually to possess, 


64 


Ou After Days 


Vil 


Who ever experienced a sudden and over- 
whelming calamity, threatening death or even 
insupportable humiliation, that did not look 
up to the power that has been proving itself 
so much greater than his own, without an 
instantaneous appeal to it for mercy or help: 
It is to him a sudden revelation of his 1mpo- 
tent subordination to a power incalculably 
superior to his own. When, during our Civil 
War, the North had a million of men in the 
field warring with another army only a little 
less numerous, no one old enough to have 
been a concerned observer of those times but 
must have noticed how largely the press, the 
literature, and the platform eloquence of that 
crisis reflected a sense of even greater de- 
pendence upon the goodness and mercy of 
supernal authority than upon the bravery of 
our soldiers, the skill of our generals, or the 
wisdom of our statesmen. Lincoln, in his 
Gettysburg address, only voiced the Spiritual 
elevation of the nation because of its trials, 
as the ebbing and flowing of the ocean tides 
respond to the revolutions of the moon. 


65 


In After Days 


Deplorable and unprecedented as have 
been the recent dispensations of Providence 
in the south of Italy, the reports which are 
coming to us not only from there, but from 
other sympathetic nations, render it not diffi- 
cult to believe the assurance they give to not 
only the Italian survivors, but to the rest of 
the world, that there is a God that rules, and 
that man was not created in His or in any 
image, merely for what he was or could be- 
come during his brief incarnate life. It is 
not so much through our blessings as through 
our trials, our sufferings, and our disappoint- 
ments, that we feel both the need and the cer- 
tainty of a God of Love that controls our 
destinies; that what He creates is never born 
to die. Cowper, in describing the great 
Sicilian earthquake of 1783, says: 


“Revelry, and dance, and show 
Suffer a syncope and solemn pause, 
While God performs upon the trembling stage 
Of His own works His dreadful part alone. . 
His wrath is busy and His frown is fell.” 


Nothing produces upon us a more spirit- 


ualizing influence than imminent danger. 
66 


Ju After Days 


Hence the sailor is one of the most supersti- 
tious of wage-earners—that is, one of the 
most religious—according to his lights. It 
is proverbial that one who goes to sea never 
knows where he will be buried. The more 
the sailor learns of the treachery of the sea 
the more he puts faith in the Ruler of the 
Seas and in that Ruler’s love and mercy. He 
faces its most imminent perils with the same 
composure as any ordinary professional duty. 

The least spiritually minded and, therefore, 
least religious, are apt to be those who are 
brought up in luxury, protected by every pos- 
sible form of human security, with no danger 
apparently to fear or enemies to contend 
with. It is not until the Master permits 
Satan to test them like Job with disease, the 
desertion of friends, the privation of property 
or character, that they begin to realize that 
there is a superior power, a ruling Provi- 
dence. “When it thundered we _ believed 
Jove to reign,’ * wrote the most famous of the 
Latin poets, who died only eight years before 
Jesus of Nazareth was born. 


1Ccelo tonantem credidimus Jovem Regnare. 


67 


Jn After Days 


Who has ever lived long in the world 
without sharing the aspiration of the Royal 
Psalmist, 

“Lead me, O Lord, to a Rock that is high- 
er than [”’? 


Vill 


Though the nature and terms of the prob- 
lem under discussion imply, if it is not ex- 
pressed, that it is to be determined by human 
reason alone, of course the most conclusive 
testimony as to the existence of life beyond 
the grave which is to be found in the 
Word, more commonly known as the Bible, 
because of its claim to a supernatural origin 
is excluded; but among the documents in- 
cluded in all modern editions of the Bible 
there are some letters which cannot be ex- 
cluded on that ground, and which afford us 
about as unassailable testimony to the per- 
petuity of human life as can be found for 
any historic event recorded prior to the 
Christian era. Paul, a Jew of Tarsus, was a 
contemporary of Jesus of Nazareth, and but 
ten years his senior. When approaching 

68 


Su Afier Days 


middle life Paul was converted to an abso- 
lute faith in the mission of Jesus, of whose 
doctrines and disciples he had theretofore 
been the most conspicuous of persecutors. 
He then became a missionary of the Chris- 
tian faith to the Gentiles. Our Bible contains 
several of his letters. In the Fifteenth Chapter 
of his first letter to the Corinthians he says: 


“Now I make known unto you, brethren, the 
Gospel which I preached unto you, which also ye 
received, wherein also ye stand, by which also ye 
are saved. . . . Christ died for our sins, according 
to the Scriptures, and that He was buried and that 
He hath been raised on the third day, according to 
the Scriptures, and that He appeared to Cephas, 
then to the twelve, then he appeared to above five 
hundred brethren at once, of whom the greater part 
remain until‘now, but some are fallen asleep; then 
He appeared to James, then to all the apostles, 
and, last of all, as unto one born out of due time, 
He appeared to me also, for I am the least of the 
apostles that am not meet to be called an apostle 
because I persecuted the Church of God.” 


This statement of the reappearance of 
Jesus after His crucifixion is as authentic 
evidence of a future life as any fact accred- 


69 


Su After Days 


ited to Plato or to Aristotle or to Thucydides 
or even to Horace or Plutarch, for of none 
of these writers any more than of St. Paul 
have we any autograph manuscript; and yet 
the young men of all the universities of im- 
portance are still taught to study such of their 
writings as have survived them, and to give 
them the credit of doing their best to tell 
what at the time they believed and thought 
and taught. It is more difficult for a rational 
man to doubt that Paul believed that five 
hundred people saw Jesus after His resurrec- 
tion, that the apostles or that he himself saw 
Him also after His resurrection and for a 
period, and that He was visible to some of 
them for more than a month, than it is to 
doubt that the life of Socrates was terminated 
by drinking hemlock, or that Plato and 
Xenophon are responsible authors for that 
story. All human testimony is liable to be 
fallible, but if any human testimony is credi- 
ble, what is more credible than Paul’s testi- 
mony of the appearance of Jesus to himself 
and to His disciples after His crucifixion, 
and what better proof of a future life can be 
asked or desired? 
70 


Su After Days 


IX 


But there is evidence of the perpetuity of 
life even more incontestable because many 
centuries more modern than Paul’s, and 
proportionately more easy to be authenti- 
cated. 

Emanuel Swedenborg—quite the most il- 
lustrious scientist of his generation; whose 
views not only of human life in this world 
but in the Great Beyond it is no longer fash- 
ionable to deride, and whose expositions of 
the interior or spiritual significance of the 
Word of God are talked of and accredited 
now to a constantly increasing extent, and 
proclaimed in pretty much every written 
language of every civilized country—in the 
fourth decade of his life became endowed 
with a gift of spiritual vision of the same 
_kind as that which appears to have been 
vouchsafed to the Hebrew prophets, and 
especially to the inspired editor of the 
Apocalypse. He appears to have been di- 
rected by the Lord to explain with great 
fulness the interior or spiritual meaning of 
the Word of God, for which exposition the 

71 


Sun After Days 


world had not been prepared at the time He 
was manifested in the flesh, nor even when 
the canon of our Bible was determined. In 
these his moments of super-sensuous life Swe- 
denborg was permitted to visit the spiritual 
world where the enfranchised spirits from this 
terrestrial life are congregated. In the third 
volume of the Arcana Celestia, the most 
voluminous of his works, we find the follow- 
ing statement of an incident which occurred 
to its author while thus admitted to a personal 
intercourse with the world of disembodied 
spirits: 

“Among the Gentiles, however, just as 
among Christians, there are both the wise 
and the simple. In order that I might be 
instructed as to the quality of these, it has 
been granted me to speak with both wise and 
simple, sometimes for hours and days. But 
of the wise there are scarcely any at this day 
[1750], whereas in ancient times there were 
many, especially in the Ancient Church, from 
which wisdom emanated to many nations. 
In order that I might know of what quality 
these were, I have been allowed to hold fa- 
miliar converse with some of them, so that 


72 


Su After Days 


the nature of their wisdom and its superiority 
to that of the present day may be seen from 
what follows. 

“There was present with me a certain per- 
son who was formerly among the more wise, 
and was thereby well known in the learned 
world. \ conversed with him on various sub- 
jects, and as I knew that he had been a wise 
man, I spoke with him concerning wisdom, 
intelligence, order, the Word, and finally con- 
cerning the Lord. Concerning wisdom he 
said that there is no other wisdom than that 
which is of Life, and that wisdom can be 
predicted of nothing else. Concerning in- 
tellizence he said that it was from wisdom. 
Concerning order he said that it is from the 
Supreme God, and that to live in that order 
is to be wise and intelligent. As regards the 
Word, when I read to him something from 
the prophecies, he was very greatly delighted, 
especially from the fact that each of the names 
and each of the words signified interior things, 
wondering greatly that the learned of this 
day are not delighted with such a study. I 
plainly perceived that the interiors of his 
thought or mind had been opened, and at 


73 


Ju After Bays 


the same time that those of certain Christians 
who were present had been closed; for ill- 
will against him prevailed with them, and 
also unbelief that the Word is of this nature. 
Nay, when I went on reading the Word, he 
said that he could not be present, because he 
perceived it to be too holy for him to endure, 
so interiorly was he affected. ‘The Christians, 
on the other hand, said aloud that they could 
be present; and this was because their in- 
teriors had been closed, and therefore the 
holy things did not affect them. At length 
I talked with him about the Lord; that He 
was born a man, but was conceived of God; 
that He had put off the human and had put 
on the divine; and that it is He who governs 
the universe. To this he made answer that 
he knew many things about the Lord, and 
perceived in his own way that it could not 
have been done otherwise if the human race 
was to be saved. Meantime certain wicked 
Christians injected various difficulties, for 
which he did not care, saying that it was not 
surprising, because they had become imbued 
in the life of the body with unbecoming ideas 
respecting these things, and that until such 
74 


Su After Days 


ideas were dispersed they could not admit 
things confirmatory, as could those who are 
ignorant. This man was a Gentile.” 

In another of Swedenborg’s works en- 
titled Calo et Inferno (Heaven and Hell) 
—all his theological works were written in 
Latin—we find that the Gentile here referred 
to was Marcus Tullius Cicero, as appears 
by the following paragraph: 

“292. There are among Gentiles, as among 
Christians, both wise and simple. That I 
might be instructed as to their quality, it has 
been given me to speak with both, sometimes | 
for hours and days. But at this day there are 
no such wise ones as in ancient times, especial- 
ly in the Ancient Church, which was spread 
through a large part of the Asiatic world, and 
from which religion emanated to many na- 
tions. That I might know their quality, it 
has been granted me to have familiar con- 
versation with some of these wise men. 
There was a certain one with me who was 
among the wiser men of his time, and con- 
sequently well known in the learned world, 
with whom I conversed on various subjects: 
I was given to believe that it was Cicero. 


: 75 


Su After Days 


And because I knew that he was a wise man, 
I conversed with him about wisdom, intelli- 
gence, order, and the Word.” 

Then follow almost a verbatim repetition 
of the words quoted above from the Arcana 
Celestia. It is a fact of incomparable inter- 
est and importance, when considered in con- 
nection with this spiritual interview, that 
Cicero, the reported Gentile, was in his tem- 
poral life a profound believer in the Unity 
of the Godhead, in the Divine origin of 
Life, and in the divine origin of all crea- 
tive power; and that his standard of morals, 
as described in his writings, was as high, 
perhaps higher, than that of most professing 
Christians of even our own time. The 
evidences may be found in the imaginary 
‘Dream of Scipio,” recorded in his Republica, 
and in his Tusculanes, and in his De Offcits. 
The latter was a Latin text-book in the col- 
lege in which I was educated. 

I can imagine no one who shall have read 
with a mind open to the reception of truth 
for truth’s sake, being able to doubt for one 
moment any one of the facts stated in these 
paragraphs by Swedenborg, or could be- 

76 


Qu After Dayz 


lieve that a man whose life was a model of 
every virtue, and whose reputation was even 
more spotless than that of any of the disci- 
ples of Jesus is reported to have been, could 
have deliberately not only reported, but have 
written down in two separate and indepen- 
dent works at different times, of course, pre- 
cisely the same account of his conversation 
with an eminent Roman citizen who had died 
seventeen centuries at least before he was 
born. 

I cannot help thinking this the most im- 
portant evidence the world has outside of the 
Bible not only of a Future Life, but even of 
Cicero’s authorship of the Works from which 
I have quoted as his. 

I must now ask the indulgent reader’s at- 
tention to extracts from Cicero’s writings, 
which may serve to explain why Swedenborg 
found him seventeen centuries later among 
those Gentile Spirits noted for their wis- 
dom. 

In the sixty-second year of his age Cicero 
lost his lovely daughter Tullia, still in her 
childhood. His affliction was so great in 
consequence that he abandoned public life 


77 


Su After Days 


and devoted himself to philosophical studies 
at one of his several country homes. At his 
Tusculan villa he spent five days in discuss- 
ing with certain of his friends questions to 
which the bereavement may have given 
peculiar—may I not add Providential ?—im- 
portance, such as: 

How to contemn the terrors of death; 

How to support affliction with forti- 
tude; 

How to submit to the accidents of life; 

How to moderate our passions; and 

How to explain the sufficiency of virtue to 
make us happy. 

These five conferences he published under 
the title of Tusculan Disputations. 

The following extracts are sufficient to 
reveal the rock foundation of Cicero’s faith, 
both in the perpetuity of Life and the abso- 
lute Unity of the Godhead, of which Sweden- 
borg is perhaps in many respects the most 
veridical of all witnesses. | 

‘The greatest proof of all is, that Nature 
herself gives a silent judgment in favor 
of the immortality of the soul, inasmuch 
as all are anxious, and that to a great 

78 


Qu After Days 


degree, about the things which concern fu- 
turity— 


‘One plants what future ages shall enjoy, 


as Statius saith in his Synephebi. What is 
his object in doing so, except that he is in- 
terested in posterity? Shall the industrious 
husbandman, then, plant trees the fruit of 
which he shall never see? .And shall not 
the great man found laws, institutions, and 
a republic? What does the procreation of 
children imply—and our care to continue 
our names—and our adoptions—and our 
scrupulous exactness in drawing up wills— 
and the inscriptions on monuments, and 
panegyrics, but that our thoughts run on 
futurity? There is no doubt but a judg- 
ment may be formed of nature in general, 
from looking at each nature in its most per- 
fect specimens; and what is a more perfect 
specimen of a man than those who look 
on themselves as born for the assistance, 
the protection, and the preservation of oth- 
Se 

“Hercules has gone to heaven; he would 
never have gone thither had he not whilst 


79 


Su After Days 


amongst men prepared the way himself. 
These are all of ancient dates, and have be- 
sides the sanction of universal religions.? 
“For, if those men now think that they 
have attained something who have seen the 
mouth of the Pontus, and those straits which 
were passed by the ship called Argo, because, 


From Argos she did chosen men convey, 
Bound to fetch back the golden fleece, their prey; 


or those who have seen the straits of the 
ocean, 


Where the swift waves divide the neighbouring 
shores 


Of Europe, and of Afric, 


‘This paragraph may have suggested to the most 
illustrious historian of the Imperial Annals of Rome 
his notable hypothesis, ‘‘Si quis piorum monitus locus,” 
etc., so happily parodied by the most eminent poet of 
the Victorian era in the following lines: 


“Yet if, as holiest men have deem’d, there be 
A land of souls beyond that sable shore 
To shame the doctrine of the Sadducee 
And sophist, madly vain of dubious lore, 
How sweet it were in concert to adore 
With those who made our mortal labours light, 
To hear each voice we fear’d to hear no more, 
Behold each mighty shade reveal’d to sight, 
The Bactrian, Samian sage, and all who taught the right.” 
—Childe Harold, ii, 8. 
80 


Sn After Bays 


what kind of sight do you imagine that will 
be, when the whole earth is laid open to our 
view ? and that, too, not only in its position, 
form, and boundaries, nor those parts of it 
only which are habitable, but those also that 
lie uncultivated, through the extremities of 
heat and cold to which they are exposed; 
for not even now is it with our eyes that we 
view what we see, for the body itself has no 
senses; but (as the naturalists, aye, and even 
the physicians assure us, who have opened 
our bodies, and examined them), there are 
certain perforated channels from the seat of 
the soul to the eyes, ears, and nose; so that 
frequently, when either prevented by medita- 
tion, or the force of some bodily disorder, we 
neither hear nor see, though our eyes and 
ears are open, and in good condition; so that 
we may easily apprehend that it is the soul 
itself which sees and hears, and not those 
parts which are, as it were, but windows to 
the soul; by means of which, however, it 
can perceive nothing, unless it is on the spot, 
and exerts itself. How shall we account for 
the fact that by the same power of thinking 
we comprehend the most different things, 
81 


Su After Days 


as color, taste, heat, smell, and sound? 
which the Soul could never know by her five 
messengers, unless everything was referred 
to her, and she were the sole judge of all. 
And we shall certainly discover these things 
in a more clear and perfect degree when the 
soul is disengaged from the body, and has 
arrived at that -goal to which nature leads 
her; for at present, notwithstanding nature 
has contrived, with the greatest skill, those 
channels which lead from the body to the 
soul, yet are they, in some way or other, 
stopped up with earthy and concrete bodies; 
but when we shall be nothing but soul, then 
nothing will interfere to prevent our seeing 
everything in its real substance, and in its 
true character!) 

“But there are many who press the. op- 
posite side of this question, and condemn 
souls to death, as if they were criminals 
capitally convicted; nor have they any other 
reason to allege why the immortality of the 
soul appears to thern to be incredible, except 
that they are not able to conceive what sort 
of thing the soul can be when disentangled 
from the body; just as if they could really 

82 


Su After Days 


form a correct idea as to what sort of thing 
it is, even when it is in the body; what its 
form, and size, and abode are; so that were 
they able to have a full view of all that 1s 
now hidden from them in a living body, they 
have no idea whether the soul would be dis- 
cernable by them, or whether it is of so fine 
a texture that it would escape their sight. 
Let those consider this, who say that they 
are unable to form any idea of the soul with- 
out the body, and then they will see whether 
they can form any adequate idea of what it 
is when it is in the body. For my own part, 
when I reflect on the nature of the soul, it 
appears to me a far more perplexing and 
obscure question to determine what is its 
character while it is in the body—a place 
which, as it were, does not belong to it— 
than to imagine what it is when it leaves it, 
and has arrived at the free zther, which 1s, 
if ] may so say, its proper, its own habitation, 
For unless we are to say that we cannot ap- 
prehend the character or nature of anything 
which we have never seen, we certainly may 
be able to form some notion of God, and of 
the divine soul when released from the body. 


83 


Qu After Days 


Diczarchus, indeed, and Aristoxenus, be- 
cause it was hard to understand the existence, 
and substance, and nature of the soul, as- 
serted that there was no such thing as a soul 
at all. It is, indeed, the most difficult thing 
imaginable, to discern the soul by the soul. 
And this, doubtless, is the meaning of the 
precept of Apollo, which advises every one to 
Know Himself. For 1 do not apprehend 
the meaning of the god to have been, that we 
should understand our members, our stature, 
and form; for we are not merely bodies; 
nor, when I say these things to you, am [| 
addressing myself to your body: when, 
therefore, he says, ‘Know Yourself,’ he says 
this, “Inform yourself of the nature of your 
soul’; for the body is but a kind of vessel, 
or receptacle of the soul, and whatever your 
soul does is your own act. To know the 
soul, then, unless it had been divine, would 
not have been a precept of such excellent 
wisdom, as to be attributed to a god; but 
even though the soul should not know of 
what nature itself is, will you say that it 
does not even perceive that it exists at all, 
or that it has motion? on which is founded 
84 


Su After Days 


that reason of Plato’s, which is explained by 
Socrates in the Phadrus, and inserted by 
me, in my sixth book of the Republic: 
“<That which is always moved is eternal; 
but that which gives motion to something 
else, and is moved itself by some external 
cause, when that motion ceases, must neces- 
sarily cease to exist. hat, therefore, alone 
which is self-moved, because it is never for- 
saken by itself, can never cease to be moved. 
Besides, it is the beginning and principle of 
motion to everything else; but whatever is 
a principle has no beginning, for all things 
arise from that principle, and it cannot itself 
owe its use to anything else; for then it 
would not be a principle did it proceed from 
anything else. But if it has no beginning, it 
never will have any end; for a principle which 
is once extinguished, cannot itself be restored 
by anything else, nor can it produce any- 
thing else from itself; inasmuch as all things 
must necessarily arise from some first cause. 
And thus it comes about, that the first prin- 
ciple of motion must arise from that thing 
which is itself moved by itself; and that can 
neither have a beginning nor an end of its 


85 


Su After Days 


existence, for otherwise the whole heaven and 
earth would be overset, and all nature would 
stand still, and not be able to acquire any 
force, by the impulse of which it might be 
first set in motion. Seeing, then, that it is 
clear, that whatever moves itself is eternal, 
can there be any doubt that the soul is so? 
For everything is inanimate which is moved 
by an external force, which also belongs to 
itself. For this is the peculiar nature and 
power of the soul; and if the soul be the only 
thing in the whole world which has the power 
of self-motion, then certainly it never had a 
beginning, and therefore it is eternal.’ ” 
There are many, perhaps a majority, who 
do not trouble themselves much with specu- 
lations about the probability or improbability 
of a future life. Most people in their youth 
and early manhood are apt to be so much 
interested in the present that they can hard- 
ly be called believers or deniers of a future 
life; but I think it rarely if ever happens that 
any person takes up arms against the doctrine 
of a future life from any lack of testimony, OF, 
indeed, for any other reason than a more or 
less morbid attachment to what he regards 
86 


Su After Days 


as the pleasures of the present one. Was it 
not that pathetic conviction to which Jesus 
gave utterance in His pictorial way when a 
certain man said unto Him, “I will follow 
Thee whithersoever Thou goest”? 

“The foxes have holes, and the birds of 
the air have nests, but the Son of Man hath 
not where to lay His head.” Not even in 
the breast of the disciple who promised so 
bravely. 


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From a photograph, copyright, 1902, by J. E. Purdy, Boston 


JULIA WARD HOWE 


Hoyo the Ueil 


Julia Ward Howe 


IV 
Beyond the Weil 


| AM invited to write a paper of some two 
thousand words on the subject of Im- 
mortality. I accept this invitation to dis- 
course in print upon a theme which has long 
been familiar to me. I believe that some 
part of me is immortal. I have always so 
believed. It should be easy to give some 
account of the why and wherefore of this 
belief, yet, strange to say, I do not find it 
so. The effort of many days has only pro- 
duced a certain set of disjointed statements 
which, although in no wise contradictory to 
one another, cannot, with my poor skill, be 
made to introduce and explain one another. 
Perhaps the best thing I can attempt will be 
to examine briefly what I really think about 
a future life, and, if possible, why I think 


so and not otherwise. 
7 gl 


Su After Days 


To begin, then, with the simple notions of 
my childhood. I was born in a world in 
which the belief in a future life was almost 
unquestioned. ‘The blessedness of heaven 
and the torment of hell were presented to 
my infant imagination as the ultimates of 
my good or ill conduct in every-day life. 
Like most other children, I believed what I 
was told, and in general tried to obey the 
commands of my elders. I loved to hear 
about the heavenly life, which somehow 
seemed to furnish the skyscape of my days 
as they were added in weeks, months, and 
years. I recall having once made an offering 
to the God of my childish prayers. The 
altar was a little stool, the sacrifice some 
small objects which I supposed to be of value. 
I remember also refusing to say my prayers 
to a new nursery assistant, because it did not 
appear to me fitting to take a stranger into 
my confidence, a scruple which the authori- 
ties of the same nursery speedily overruled. 


Wordsworth has said: 


“Heaven lies about us in our infancy, 
And trailing clouds of glory do we come 
From God, who is our home.” 


g2 


Qu After Days 
And later, Emerson says of Michel Angelo, 


‘Himself from God he could not free.” 


_ Even so naturally did my idea of merit in- 
clude a divine Absolute, whom to please or 
displease would furnish the tests of good or 
ill conduct. 

Let us pass over many years of experience, 
individual, mostly not unusual, and come to 
where the enlightened intellect of the twen- 
tieth century finds itself obliged to stand. It - 
is perforce an age of question, and all thought 
which penetrates below the surface of things 
must take this attitude of interrogation, 
which should be reverent, and which may be 
insolent. In the first place, this wonder 
book, the Bible. Is it an exception to all 
human rules and laws of action? Did the 
ancient chroniclers do their best to set down 
the record of Creation and its consequences? 
Did the psalmist, the prophet, the moralist, 
each in turn contribute his highest human 
power of expression and forethought to this 
marvellous treasure of an Eastern people? 
Or did the living God of Israel dictate the 
volume, chapter, and verse to scribes espe- 

93 


Su After Days 


cially selected? Once this question would 
have been held to be impious. Now it 1s in- 
evitable; and if the Book is a human work 
its contents must be judged by human stand- 
ards. 

Supposing this to be so decided, the sys- 
tems of promise and of threat which men 
have built upon-it are also without the au- 
thority of the absolute, and our dreams of 
an endless future of recompense, painful or 
pleasurable, for the deeds done in the body, 
have all the qualities of dreams and none 
other. 

What then? Have we lost our God? 
Never for one moment. Unspeakable, He 
is, the beneficent parent, the terrible, incor- 
ruptible judge, the champion of the innocent, 
the accuser of the guilty, refuge, hope, re- 
deemer, friend; neither palace walls nor 
prison cells can keep Him out. Every step 
of our way from the birth hour He has 
gone with us. Were we at the gallows’ 
foot, and deservedly, He would leave a sweet 
drop in the cup of death. He would measure 
suffering to us, but would forbid despair. 
The victory of goodness must be complete. 

94 


Su After Bays 


The lost sheep must be found—ay, and the 
lost soul must turn to the way in which the 
peace of God prevails. We learn the dread- 
ful danger of those who wander from the 
right path, but we may also learn the redeem- 
ing power which recalls and reclaims them. 

So fade our heavens and hells. Christ, if 
He knew their secrets, did not betray them. 
On the boundless sea of conjecture we are 
still afloat, with such mental tools as we pos- 
sess to guide us, with the skies, the stars, the 
seasons, seeking a harbor from which no 
voyager has ever returned. 

So much, the later schemes of thought 
have taken from us. Shall we ask what they 
have given us in exchange for what we have 
lost? 

It seems a little strange that with the ac- 
cumulated wisdom and power of the ages a 
farmer’s son of Massachusetts should have 
been the first clearly to enunciate this im- 
portant phrase, “The transient and perma- 
nent in religion.”” We must have known of 
this distinction all along. In all that we 
think, and in much that we believe, constant 
growth and metamorphosis take pleace. Paul 

95 


Qu After Days 


says, ““When I was a child, I thought as a 
child; I believed as a child.’ How full of 
beauty were these visions of childhood, but 
also how evanescent, each evolving itself 
into one more advanced in thought, in under- 
standing, until the moment in which Love 


“Smote the chord of self, that trembling 
Passed in music out of sight.” 


Does our acquaintance with this wonder 
world terminate with the days and years of 
our age? Shall death forever divide us from 
all the marvellous story of our spiritual ex- 
periences of evil seeming for a time to pre- 
vail, of the blessed eternal good whose con- 
quest of evil is certain and final? 

Tell us, you stars mysteriously hung to 
measure the depths of the heavens. ‘Tell us, 
thou pitiable, shameful way of excess and 
error, with thy heroic redemption. Let the 
Jew speak: 

“Whither shall I go from Thy presence? 
If I ascend into heaven, Thou art there. If 
J make my bed in hell, behold! Thou art 
there also.” 

Let the apostle speak: ‘Who shall sep- 

96 


In After Days - 


arate us from the love of Christ?” In all 
these things we are conquerors, through Him 
that loved us, and loving once, loves ever. 

To me has been granted a somewhat un- 
usual experience of life. Ninety full years 
have been measured off to me, their lessons 
and opportunities unabridged by wasting dis- 
ease or gnawing poverty. I have enjoyed 
general good health, comfortable circum- 
stances, excellent company, and the incite- 
ments to personal effort which civilized so- 
ciety offers to its members. For this life and 
its gifts I am, I hope, devoutly thankful. I 
came into this world a helpless and ignorant 
bit of humanity. I have found in it many 
helps toward the attainment of my full hu- 
man stature, material, mental, moral. In 
this slow process of attainment many feat- 
ures have proved transient. Visions have 
come and gone. Seasons have bloomed and 
closed, passions have flamed and faded. 
Something has never left me. My relation 
to it has suffered many changes, but it still 
remains, the foundation of my life, light in 
darkness, consolation in ill-fortune, guide in 
uncertainty. 

97 


Su After Days 


In the nature of things, I must soon lose 
sight of this sense of constant metamorphosis 
whose limits bound our human life. How 
about this unchanging element? Will it die 
when I shall be laid in earth? ‘The visible 
world has no answer to this question. For it, 
dead is dead, and gone is gone. But a deep 
spring of life within me says: “Look beyond. 
Thy days numbered hitherto register a di- 
vine promise. Thy mortal dissolution leaves 
this promise unfulfilled, but not abrogated. 
Thou mayst hope that all that made thy 
life divine will live for thine immortal 
part.” 

I have quoted Theodore Parker’s great 
word, and have made no attempt, so far, to 
bring into view considerations which may 
set before us the fundamental distinction ‘be- 
tween what in human experience passes and 
what abides. 

In the first place, human life passes, like 
other life. The splendid blossom, the noble 
fruit. Inquire into its power and glory after 
two-thirds of a century have passed over 
it. You will find weakness in the place of 
strength, the mournful attar of memory re- 

98 


Qu After Days 


placing as it can the fresh fragrance of hope. 
The bowed form suggests the segment of a 
mystic circle. ‘The restricted mind turns its 
tools into toys. “They did not measure the 
infinite for us. Let us get from their uses 
such pleasure as we can.” 

Life passes, but the conditions of life do 
not. Air, food, water, the moral sense, the 
mathematical problem and its solution. These 
things wait upon one generation much as 
they did upon its predecessor. What, too, is 
this wonderful residuum which refuses to dis- 
appear when the very features of time seem 
to succumb to the law of change, and we 
recognize our world no more? Whence comes 
this system in which man walks as in an ar- 
tificial frame, every weight and lever of which 
must correspond with the outlines of an eter- 
nal pattern? 

Our spiritual life appears to include three 
terms in one. They are ever with us, this 
Past which does not pass, this Future which 
never arrives. ‘They are part and parcel of 
this conscious existence which we call Pres- 
ent. While Past and Future have each their 
seasons of predominance, both are contained 


99 


Jn After Bays 


in the moment which is gone while we say, 
“It is here.” 

So the Eternal is with us, whether we will 
or not, and the idea of God is inseparable 
from the persuasion of immortality; the 
Being which, perfect in itself, can neither 
grow nor decline, nor indeed undergo any 
change whatever. The great Static of the 
universe, the rationale of the steadfast faith 
of believing souls, the sense of beauty which 
justifies our high enjoyments, the sense of 
proportion which upholds all that we can 
think about ourselves and our world, the 
sense of permanence which makes the child 
in very truth parent to the man, able to solve 


the deepest riddle, the profoundest problem’ 


in all that is. Let us then willingly take the 
Eternal with us in our flight among the suns 
and stars. 

Experience 1s our great teacher, and on 
this point it is wholly wanting. No one on 
the farther side of the great Divide has been 
able to inform those on the hither side of 
what lies beyond. 

Yet our whole life, rightly interpreted, 
shows us the never-failing mercy of a divine 

100 


EE ee — 


2c -- & Bw, 


Su After Days 
Parent. We may ask, “Whither shall I go 


from Thy presence?” And we may answer, 
“Surely, goodness and mercy shall follow me 
all the days of my eternal life, and I shall 
dwell in the house of the Lord forever.” 

The anticipation of a life beyond the grave 
so belongs to our human mastery over the 
conditions of animal life that it seems to be 
an integral part of our human endowment. 

We feel something in us that cannot die 
when blood and brain, muscle and tissue, 
have reached the brief and uncertain term of 
their service. For so long, the body can per- 
form its functions and hold together, but what 
term is set for the soul? Nothing in its make- 
up foretokens a limited existence. Its sen- 
tence would seem to be, “‘Once and always.” 

The promise of a future life is held to have 
such prominence in Christ’s teaching as to 
lead Paul to say that the Master “brought 
life and immortality to light.” How did He 
do this? By filling the life of to-day with the 
consciousness of eternal things, of truths and 
principles which would not change if the 
whole visible universe were to pass away. 

No one to-day, I think, will maintain that 

101 


Sn After Days 


Christ created the hope which He aroused to 
an activity before undreamed of. The major- 
ity of the Jews believed in a life after death, 
as 1s shown by the segregation of the Sad- 
ducees from the orthodox of the synagogue. 
The new teaching vindicated the spiritual 
rights and interests of man. From the depths 
of his own heart was evolved the conscious- 
ness of a good that could not die. Man, the 
creature of a day, has a vested interest in 
things eternal. The solid principles upon 
which the social world is organized, the laws 
of which Sophocles makes Antigone say that 
“they are not of to-day nor yesterday.” 
Creatures of a day as we seem, there is that 
in us which is older than the primeval rocks, 
than the vAy out of which this earth, our 
temporary dwelling-place, was made. The 
reason which placed the stars, the sense of 
proportion which we recognize in the plan- 
etary system, finds its correspondence in this 
brain of ours. We question every feature of 
what we see, think, and feel. We try every link 
of the chain and find it sound if we ourselves 
are sound. ‘This power of remotest question 
and assent is not of to-day nor yesterday. 
102 


In After Days 


It transcends all bounds of time and space. 
It weighs the sun, explores the pathway of the 
stars, and writes, having first carefully read, 
the history of earth and heaven. It moves 
in company with the immortals. How much 
of it is mortal? Only so much as a small 
strip of earth can cover. These remains are 
laid away with reverence, having served their 
time. What has become of the wonderful 
power which made them alive? It belongs 
to that in nature which cannot die. 

A babe wept on the borders of the Nile, a 
foundling, destined for death, but fated to 
dictate rules of action to the human world. 
How did this come about? The babe, res- 
cued and grown to manhood, has come upon 
something as unchangeable as the law of 
numbers. 

Oh, baby in the Nile shallows, wiser than 
the Sphinx; oh, saint in the Athenian prison; 
oh, discoverer of the second birth, regenerator 
of mankind—what do you teach us? The 
eternal hope which lies in God’s eternal good- 
ness. What is best for thee and me will be. 


* 
ay ost ah 


Pain 


Rs a OY 
>) AK A ny 


MER wT NA ANAT 


?) = 
ya arate pe he Wh 


HENRY MILLS ALDEN 


Che Other Side of Mortality 
Geury Mills Alden 


y 
Ghe Other Side of Mlortaliiy 


I 


HEN Tom Appleton, whose wit added 

much to the gayety of Boston and New- 
port fifty years ago, was told that he was 
about to die, he said, “‘ How interesting!” 

And really there is nothing so interesting 

as this dying. Not merely to those immedi- 
ately confronting the great fascination, and 
many of these have not the wit to see it as 
that, or to regard it with the degree or kind 
of imaginative expectancy which the occasion 
warrants. ‘The loving, who are left behind, 
may be excused for not looking upon the 
event in that light at all. The sense of loss 
blurs their vision, and when grief is assuaged 
by time the “world beyond”’ seems interest- 
ing chiefly because so many dear ones have 
passed thither. 

8 107 


Qu After Days 


Putting away the poignancy of separation 
from our thought of death, and thus becom- 
ing disinterested as to any purely personal 
point of view, we are possessed by a larger 
interest in mortality itself. 


Il 


From its beginning, mortality has been 
bound up with love. ‘There is no mortality 
in the inorganic world, none in the lowest 
order of organisms—the unicellular, in which 
there is propagation by simple fissure, the 
continuity never broken. The amceba of to- 
day is the original amceba. ‘The one half of 
the cell, thus divided, was indistinguishable 
from the other. “They were not mates—each 
was the other. How could the organic world 
escape this utterly unromantic identity ? 

If the cells could have held counsel to- 
gether (and who knows what “holding 
counsel together,’ in ways unknown to us, 
there may have been) they would have agreed 
that such existence as they had was in- 
tolerable, each member of the whole assembly 

108 


Su After Days 


isolated and independent, none wanting any- 
thing of another. They would have had as 
wild desire for some kind of otherness as if 
they had been reading Prof. William James’s 
A Pluralistic Universe. ‘This desire was met 
by the specialization of sex, and with that 
came death, as if it were part and parcel of 
the great romance. 

All that we can think of as interesting in 
organic existence followed—all the flora and 
fauna of this world. But every member of 
this higher order of beings must die; and 
each individual was made up of organs so 
mutually interdependent that the chances of 
death were multiplied. 

We cannot look upon this mortality—thus 
associated with all the beauty and glory of 
the earth—as a penalty. It would seem 
rather to have been supremely desirable. Hu- 
manity, which would have been impossible 
but for this higher and more complex or- 
ganization—in which partition is for the 
sake of union—shares most largely and deep- 
ly in its beauty, glory, and romance. Why 
is it, then, that man alone should protest 
against the complementary term and look 

109 


Su After Mays 


upon death—yjust because of its intimate and 
inevitable association with love and whatever 
is lovely—as the supreme irony? However 
we may account for it—most reasonably, per- 
haps, because man alone has developed a 
tragic sense which inclines him to magnify 
the pathos of his own story—it is certainly 
not a normal or natural view, not an accept- 
ance of life upon its own terms. 

Besides, it is a most ungracious attitude. 
Mortality is chiefly interesting because it 
belongs to the Kingdom of Grace. ‘The asso- 
ciation of it with the Realm of Law—or, 
rather, the kind of conception of that asso- 
ciation which has generally been entertained 
—has been the gravest of human mistakes. 
It is true that we comprehend the law only 
when we see it as love. But men have not 
thus comprehended it, and this failure has 
been most apparent in the kind of connection 
which they have insisted upon between death 
and law—as if Nature were punitive and 
death the abhorred penalty she holds over us, 
inevitable finally in any case, but also forever 
impending, All the perverted conceptions 
that have been entertained of God and Nat- 

110 


Su After Days 


ure began with this false idea of death as 
something terrible—this death which had 
come into the world before there was any- 
thing that could be thought of as punishable 
or as in any way other than it should be, 
and which, ever since it began to be, had 
been bound up with natural law as it had 
been with love in an association as beautiful 
as it is possible for us to imagine. 

But the more we look upon the world as 
a continuous creation—a constant becoming 
—the grace of it all impresses us rather than 
the law of it, which, after all, is only our 
mental generalization. Harmony is inherent 
in creation, where everything is fit in becom- 
ing at all. This identity of “‘becomingness”’ 
with “fitness” is registered in our common 
speech. ‘‘Grace” is a more expressive word 
than “‘fitness,’’ because it is more intimate 
to the thought of creative and abounding 
life. ‘The very fact, then, that mortality is, 
that it became—in the series of becomings— 
that it is inevitable in the higher order of 
organic existence, that it is inseparable from 
every quality which makes them beautiful or 
interesting, should not only quell in us any 

III 


Ju After Days 


doubts or fears concerning it, but convince 
us of its grace and bounty. 

The more we ourselves are in the King- 
dom of Grace—the more we are Christians, 
following the Master’s own thought and lead- 
ing—the more gracious and significant will 
this mortality seem to us. ‘They who live 
sordid lives, full of greed, envy, and ambi- 
tion, are hostile to death, which loosens their 
tenacious grasp of earthly prizes. ‘There is 
in our loves a nobler kind of avarice which 
denies to death the full measure of its sweet- 
ness and worth. But the first word or token 
of the spiritual life 1s Release—we lose to 
find. We give up, without the thought of 
gain for ourselves, just for the sake of others, 
even “in honor preferring one another.” We 
do not thus yield because we ought; it 1s a 
vital and spontaneous altruism. It is by a 
natural grace—I had almost said politeness 
—that one generation gives place to another, 
and the courtesy is more appreciable because 
it is not sudden, but waits to yield a maturity 
of service in a gradual and deliberately con- 
scious descension. This grace of waiting 
leads to the development of all the domestic 

112 


Su After Days 


and social graces—the amenities and sym- 
pathies which are the heart culture of hu- 
manity. This culture could never, in any 
generation, have been so quick and zest- 
ful save in the face of death, and it could 
not have attained its present scope and va- 
riety, forever retaining its freshness, but for 
its constant renewal and increase with each 
successive generation. And if we consider 
the culture of the mind and soul, beyond the 
range of the affections, prompted by disin- 
terested curiosity, as summed up in human 
science, art, and imaginative literature, we 
see that it could never have had a beginning, 
any initial impulse, in a race whose continu- 
ance upon the earth was stable, not broken 
by mortality and renewed by nativity. What 
stimulus to growth, what possibilities of ex- 
pansion, would Imagination have in that level 
and sterile world ? 


Ill 


Divest man of his mortality, then all that 
remains to him as an investment loses its 
value. As a denizen of the earth, he would 


113 


Qu After Bays 


be placed in a situation involving the dullest 
irony, supposing that on such terms he could 
have life at all, or partnership with the living 
world about him—really an untenable hy- 
pothesis, since there is no life we know the 
other side of which (and that side next and 
most intimate) is not death, no participation 
in any life without partaking also of mor- 
tality. But granted the anomaly, there 1s 
the irony. Every living thing else 1s part of 
an ever-changing scene, budding, blossom- 
ing, fruit-bearing, decaying. ‘The seasons 
come and go. The meanest seed may die 
and from its grave have quick ascent and 
increase. He alone dryly abides; for him 
no passing, no increment. ‘This is an irony 
by the side of which that poignant irony 
which pierces his heart because all that 1s 
loveliest must die and he too must die, leav- 
ing behind all that he most loves, is sur- 
passingly interesting; and indeed he makes 
the most of its pathos and romance in his 
art and in his literature. 

The romance of death, while it is so large 
an element in our appreciation of it, is never 
quite dissociated from its pathos. 

114 


Su After Bays 


The mere body of death has no attraction 
for us; we instinctively put it away from us 
and bury it out of sight. Death itself re- 
pudiates it and refuses to be defined in terms 
of a corruption which no longer lies next to 
such life as it has served but which belongs 
to purely physical forces outside of its king- 
dom. What life has abandoned death also 
has left behind. 

As I have said, life has no romance save 
in the face of death. While we live, the 
physiological reaction is measured by the ex- 
tent and quickness of our dying. Sleep, 
which is at once our undoing and our re- 
creation, would abortively fall short of its full 
meaning were it not the image of death; 
and the dream in like manner lose its subtle 
complement. ‘The psychical reaction is of 
ereater moment. ‘The term of life is marked 
by a limited cycle, enclosing for each of us 
our individual experience. At every point 
of advance there is a new horizon. When 
we reach the end—what then? ‘There could 
be no greater challenge to the imagination. 
This is the largest romance death offers. But 
within the cycle there is at every step the 

115 


Jn After Bays 


thanatopsis. History is the record not only 
of past times, but of a humanity that has 
passed—an unreturning host, of whom but 
few in any generation have left so much as 
their names behind them. But for this pass- 
ing and the human sense of it there would 
have been no record at all, and no motive 
for preservative: art. Sie transit: and be- 
cause glory was of the transient deed, and 
beauty of forms that vanish, there was the 
quick sense of these and the desire to hold 
them in arrest, as the poet and the sculptor 
hold them. 

Death has always haunted the poet’s 
thought, insisting upon its own note, piercing 
or pensive, in every imaginative creation— 
against it in bold relief must stand heroism, 
love, and friendship. In tragedy it was death 
out of time or precipitated by mysterious fate 
that heightened the pathetic moment as in the 
epic it had heightened the heroic. Iphigenia, 
whose story would seem to intimate that there 
was in the untimely death of the victim some- 
thing so sharply sweet to the gods that it 
turned them from wrath to mercy, was for 


Euripides what Patroclus was for Homer. 
116 


ee oe 


Su After Bays 
The grief in Shelley’s Adonais, in Milton’s Ly- 


cidas, and in Tennyson’s In Memoriam 1s set 
against death, thus untimely, in gentler relief. 

Very different from the pathos, mingled 
with our zsthetic impressions, which we feel 
in this distant contemplation of death face 
to face with a life indirectly presented to us 
in art or literature and in every chapter of 
human history, is that which we feel in our 
immediate experience. The poet may ex- 
press the thought and sentiment of it for us 
in pertinent phrase and illuminating meta- 
phor, but not the reality of it; nor can I at- 
tempt to express that for my readers. 


IV 


This pathos is too deep for tears, and the 
sombre habiliments of mourning contradict 
rather than express its true meaning. Black- 
ness befits the dulness of despair, not the 
quickness of this grief for loved ones lost. 
If the angel of death is not here the angel 
of life, then indeed has his brightness van- 
ished and we are duped by mortality, No! 

117 


Sun After Bays 


Here more than anywhere death is the quick- 
ener of human hearts, expanding hope, faith, 
and love beyond all visible limitations. The 
curtain folding us closely about unfolds to 
another light, as night unveils the stars. The 
sharpest grief pierces into this strange 
brightness. 

Our praise of-mortality therefore halts not 
because of the keen affliction that has first 
pierced our hearts, but—to use Isaiah’s phrase 
—with ‘“‘a sword bathed in heaven.” Here- 
in, indeed, lies the chief value of mortality, 
—that, closing one door, it opens another, 
never leaving life’s thoroughfare for the by- 
ways of corruption. “Let the dead bury its 
dead.” Death speaks in the words of the 
Master, ‘‘Come thou and follow me.” It is 
not yet our own time to follow, but we hear 
the voice, and we see in swift vision the 


winged Psyche free of her chrysalis. 


Vv 


Life takes the highway, which never even 
skirts the tomb. It is the highway of end- 
118 


Su After Days 


less change. It was the way of the physical 
world before death entered it—that world 
which seems to us uniform and immutable 
because its transformations have so vast a 
scale and scope that the latest of them was 
earlier than anything we call living. Beyond 
that, the retrospect is hidden from us. Pos- 
sibly it was from the beginning a living uni- 
verse. But now, in our strange partnership 
with it, we are sensible only of the side turned 
to us—its dying side—its descent for our 
rising, and in our fancy we picture to our- 
selves its long course of decadence before its 
gracious abeisance to the Cell. Of its as- 
cending side we know nothing. Perhaps 
mutation is a truer word for its procession 
than evolution. Certainly it is a truer word 
for the procession of what we call life— 
truest of all for the human soul on its path- 
way here and hereafter, with Death for its 
shining leader, whose torch is never inverted. 
The light of this torch, while it is thrown 
forward farther than our eyes can see, is also 
forever turned backward upon our earthly 
life, by its illumination revealing the glory 
of that life more and more, from generation 


11g 


Su After Bays 


to generation; and the light is more and 
more the light of love, since Death is forever 
bound up with Love. 

Hence the growth of a deeper humanism 
from age to age, through changes in emo- 
tional and psychical sensibility — changes 
which cannot be accounted for by natural 
selection and which involve surprises not 
precalculable. New interests and new mo- 
tives emerge, new beauty, new truth, and a 
new sense of life. The changes are more 
rapid with every generation because we op- 
pose less resistance to the current whose 
pulsations are death, in the falling, and birth 
in the rising—the systole and diastole. We 
more willingly let old things pass into new, 
while we pass with them, yielding to the 
stream without misgiving. ‘This it is to have 
faith in life through comprehension of death. 


VI 


Looking beyond the term of individual life, 
we are thus better prepared to expect a new 
surprise, of which we seem to catch a radiant 

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In After Days 


glimpse. It cannot be otherwise than that 
a marvellous change awaits us, though we 
know not what it is. 

Some of us who are nearing or have passed 
the scripturally allotted term have been asked 
to say in this collection of essays what we 
think and feel concerning this matter. We 
may well be supposed to find the theme more 
interesting—the romance of it more Inviting. 
For us the land slopes down, with a western 
exposure, to the Garden of Hesperides whose 
apples are golden, and we breathe fragrant 
airs from an unknown sea suggesting the 
new adventure. But that sea is hidden 
from us, as from all others, until we fall 
asleep. 

Our mature experience avails not, except 
by way of preparation if we have acquired 
the habit of dying, thus making the most 
of the life that now is for all of its val- 
ues —by the closest culture of its whole 
held. 

Our experience does not enable us to know 
ourselves—that larger part of us which 
creatively determines the scope of our powers, 
the mutations of our sensibility, and the very 

121 


Ju After Days 


physiognomy of individual bodies and souls. 
All this is hidden from us, though it is the 
eround of our experience in this earthly life. 
The ground of our mystical partnership with 
Nature is also hidden, as is the bond of our 
kinship with all life; yet these are natively 
our heritage. We have, as natively, a real 
knowledge of this continuity as something 
implicit and unbroken. 

But what we know about ourselves or the 
world outside of us is only that which 1s 
definable in our consciousness through dis- 
continuity and disintegration, so that we ex- 
press judgments or discriminations. ‘To de- 
fine is to note the limit, the line of cleavage, 
the contour. We call the words by which 
we do this ‘“‘terms,” as denoting endings. 
We know in this explicit way only the boun- 
daries of things and, of things that pass, the 
interruption of the current. We bind like 
things together by a mental process of classi- 
fication, which is not reintegration, and ar- 
rive at general concepts. Thus we have 
formal as distinguished from real knowledge, 
because we have ‘“‘discourse of reason,” be- 
cause we have intellects which react upon 

122 


Ju After Days 


the phenomena of the world and of our ex- 
perience, defining them, making inductive 
and deductive judgments concerning them, 
reducing them to systems in our minds—all 
of which we express in our speech. It is a 
very important kind of knowledge, such as 
pertains distinctively to human intelligence. 
It has the same relation to the development 
of human thought that experimentation has 
to material and social progress, but a very 
much larger range. We think about every- 
thing, and our speculation seems to gain 
ereater facility when it passes beyond all the 
data of our observation and experience. Our 
abstract conceptions, especially when we can 
express them in words beginning with a 
capital letter, like “Absolute” and “‘In- 
finite,” have a kind of tyranny over us. Our 
philosophical speculation from Plato to our 
own time, as Professor James has shown in 
his latest book, is made up mostly of these 
imposing but empty abstractions. 

This “thin” philosophy, as Professor 
James expressively calls it, cannot help us 
to any real sense of our present existence and 
still less of the life to come. Our thought 

9 123 


Su After Days 


about a future life, however ‘‘thin,” when it 
takes the shape of a theory, has some “‘thick- 
ness” from the desire for the continuity in 
that life of the individual consciousness and 
for conscious reunion with loved ones who 
have gone before. It would seem strange to 
us that, in connection with the resurrections 
recorded in the Gospel, no light should have 
been thrown upon these points—that, indeed, 
no questions concerning them seem to have 
been put to the risen Lazarus by his friends 
or to the risen Christ by His disciples. But 
we must remember that then, as during the 
whole time then past since the beginning of 
history, there was no margin for curiosity 
about these things, since everybody knew all 
about them. ‘There were no questions to be 
put. Not only was there no doubt, there was 
absolutely fixed certitude. The geography 
of the underworld was more accurately 
known than that of the next province on the 
earth’s surface. 

The question, “‘If a man die, shall he live 
again?’ is as old as philosophy itself—but 
it was not a question with the common, un- 
speculative people of the ancient world. Now 

124 


EEE 


Jn After Days 


everybody thinks, and where there is no doubt 
as to the main issue there is frequently solici- 
tude as to this one point—the survival of 
individual consciousness, the interest in which 
is heightened by, and for many quite de- 
pendent upon, the possibility of future 
reunions of families and friends with full 
mutual recognition. 


vil 


As to this concern regarding the future 
restoration of intimacies broken by death, 
a careful study of the record of any com- 
munity would show how much more stress 
very many people put upon it as related to 
the future than as related to the present 
life—which does not seem quite consistent. 
Homes are broken otherwise than by death— 
forever, in the most natural way, by the 
marriages of the younger generation for the 
making of new homes. Separations and 
divorces break the most intimate of human 
ties, and those who are widowed in many in- 
stances marry again. An adopted child often 


125 


Jn After Days 


displaces one that has been early lost and, 
after years of cherishment, would not be 
given up even for the one that is gone. We 
do not love because the object is lovable; the 
object is lovable because we can love. ‘Then, 
too, we reflect that, though we may have 
lived before this life, we do not seem to miss 
anything from past lives; on the contrary, 
we would stoutly aver that those we most 
dearly love we have always loved in however 
many lives have been ours. Still, so strong 
is the sentiment by which we would cling to 
our dear ones for all lives to come, even 
though we call it the avarice of love, that it 
is painful to discuss it as if it were a ques- 
tion. The sentiment will persist to the end 
of human time; and as love grows more and 
more in the world, excluding hate, and_ is 
more luminous and significant, being con- 
stantly lifted to a higher plane of finer feel- 
ing, so that what is elemental and instinctive 
in natural ties not only shows leaf and flower 
rather than root, but takes on psychical 
veils, it seems more intelligently to demand 
expansion beyond the limits of the present 


earthly life. 


126 


Su After Days 
Vill 


And it is just this demand for expansion, 
for fuller development, which prompts the 
desire for a continuation hereafter of our 
identical individuality, even if there could 
be no renewal of earthly associations. ‘Those 
who have the largest development here have 
the keenest expectation of the future and 
would be satisfied with the assurance of just 
enough reminiscence of this life to establish 
the sense of continuity. More than that 
might be distressfully confusing, involving a 
sacrifice of all the advantages of individuality 
itself. I would rather give up the reminis- 
cence altogether than these very appreciable 
advantages. The Occidental mind does not 
take kindly to the conception of Nirvana. 
Nothing could be “thinner” than that. We 
would rather wait for a new universe—and 
the wait would not be sensibly as long as 
that between going to sleep and waking— 
and have back some sort of bodies, with a 
comfortable sequestration of our individual 
souls, and all the beautiful and varied cosmic 
phenomena about us to which we have been 

127 


Ju After Days 


accustomed, than to be suddenly and forever 
swallowed up in the inane Absolute. If we 
care so much for recognizable identity we 
should doubtless, in the new-born universe, 
have sometimes that sense of familiarity, 
seeming like a reminiscence, which we are 
now often surprised into by some especially 
novel scene or situation. We might really 
be very much like our old selves and the world 
about us substantially the same as this, for 
our study and delight. ‘The Demuurge, it is 
true, may be Protean, beyond our possible 
imagining, and the whole investment might 
be a surprising transformation, even bafHling- 
ly unanological to anything we know. We 
might have transformed capacities and facul- 
ties and not miss old things or any reminders 
of them. Of course, then as now, we might 
regard the whole thing as illogical and see 
how it might have been better fashioned, but 
it would be new. We may reasonably sup- 
pose, if our reasoning counts for anything, 
that each new universe, if not better than its 
predecessor, would be an advance. ‘There 
may be a comparative modernity in universes. 

But I am not propounding this as even 

128 


Sn After Bays 


a working hypothesis of a future life. For 
all we know, instead of universes proceeding 
in tandem, a new universe is now rising syn- 
chronously with the falling of this one, in- 
volving as this evolves—as the new year of 
a tree begins with its exfoliation. We see 
only the katabolism, the expenditure, the 
descent. The tension side is hidden from 
us. But, as to any application to our theme, 
that also is a theory. I am casting about for 
any, even plausible, chance of being saved 
from absorption into the Absolute. 


IX 


What I would fain insist upon is indi- 
viduality. Continued individuality from one 
life to another seems to involve a contradic- 
tion of terms. Formed life—that structural 
result of habit which we call character, our 
developed tastes, and our intellectual attain- 
ments—we can hardly conceive of as carried 
over into a future existence whose emer- 
gence is even newer than birth. But most 
people do so conceive, however unphilosoph- 

129 


Jn After Bays 


ical the conception may be; they think of 
that other life as beginning just where it 
stops here and going right on from that point. 
Evidently the Society for Psychical Research 
rests its whole procedure upon this assump- 
tion, and if the expectations of most of the 
members of this society should be satisfac- 
torily realized in verifiable proofs of this 
hypothesis, what can the candid philosopher 
do but accept it? On the other hand, we 
cannot positively assert that because it is 
not proven it is therefore untenable. We do 
not, perhaps, comprehend to what extent 
our mental fabric is undone in sleep and rises 
again, renewed by the re-creative ofhce of 
this same sleep. Is there in death some like 
miracle of release and restoration, the soul 
receiving back its proper vesture, wholly 
fresh and mystically transformed by the very 
power that wrought the ruinous divestiture ? 
We do not know—but if it is so, is it neces- 
sary or of any value to the soul that its rein- 
vestment should include the complete equip- 
ment it acquired on earth—of information, 
technical skill, and practical maxims, along 
with the trivial curiosity of a gossip? Is 
130 


Qu After Bays 


there no absolution in the great change? 
Must we think of these souls as_ forever 
waiting, as we imagine the Martians to be, 
for the chance of a casual communication 
with us? 

The conservation of individuality would, 
with this handicap, seem less desirable. We 
would have it as light-weighted, at least, as 
we have it here and now. We value it in 
the present life for its inviolate insulation, 
which at the same time shuts us in from 
distracting interruptions and leaves us open 
to the larger invisible currents of life. It 1s 
the essential of perfect accord with other 
souls. Thus, while it seems a kind of dis- 
continuity by reason of its sequestration, in- 
dividuality serves the continuity of life. But 
it does not make that continuity, which 1s 
indeed the first premise of all existence. 

We think ourselves as being here and now; 
it is the way of our thinking—the only way 
in which we can think at all. By the same 
formal habit of the mind we think of dying 
as going elsewhere, and speak of being 
“launched from time into eternity.” But 
this phraseology is not applicable to the 


131 


Iu After Days 


spirit itself. Distance is not real, but an 
illusion. The earth never really left the sun. 
Because of its apparent separation, which 
emphasizes the bond of union, it becomes 
the explicit expression of solarity. Eternity 
is not quantitative; it 1s the quality of this 
life as truly as it can be of any other. Resur- 
gence is an essential attribute of life; it 1s 
not a coming or a going, but a new becoming. 


x 


As mortality was not always, so it may not 
always be. Before it, was a lower order of 
life—beyond it, may be some higher order. 
So said the Master—that in the world to come 
there is no marrying or giving in marriage; 
neither shall they die any more. Sex and 
mortality began together and together they 
cease. The life without these and beyond 
these, as we know them, transcends our 
comprehension. 

We confront the great change not with a 
theory, but as our most interesting venture. 


1 Py 
car 


rh 


THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON 


Che Future Lite 
Thomas Weutworth Higginson 


Vi 
Che Huture Life 


BENEDICTO BENEDICATUR 


O years! and Age! Farewell; 
Behold I go, 
Where I do know 

Infinity to dwell. 


And these mine eyes shall see 
All times, how they 
Are lost i’ the Sea 


Of vast Eternity. 
RoBERT HERRICK. 


hee request to write a paper on the fu- 
ture life comes to me somewhat un- 
expectedly, as did once a sudden invitation 
to say grace at the dinner-table of a lady 
who had invited me to give a literary lecture 
to her school, a large and celebrated one in 
the western part of Massachusetts. It was 
many years since | had been asked to do 
such a thing, but there came into my memory 


135 


Su After Days 


two words which an American visitor finds 
so impressive at a certain college dining-hall 
at Oxford: ‘‘ Benedicto benedicatur” (“‘ Bless- 
ings to the Blessed One’’). I said this grace, 
and on sitting down afterward on the right 
hand of my hostess, I remember to have 
elanced at her with some slight misgiving, 
and she looked at me with an expression of 
radiant delight. ‘Then she said that I could 
not possibly have said a grace which would 
have impressed her so much, for she had 
previously heard it as a guest at an Oxford 
University table and it seemed to her that 
she never had heard so much put into two 
words. She felt it so greatly, indeed, that 
she took me into the chapel of the institution 
at morning service, the next day, and after 
her prayers in the presence of the students 
were over, she invited me to say something 
to them, though she knew me to be some- 
what of a heretic. This was the outcome of 
a grace learned by myself at Oxford, and I 
take it as a motto for what I have to say. 
In the wondrous description given by Plato 
of the last days of Socrates, the latter’s friend 
Crito is described as asking him the ques- 
136 


Ju After Days 


tion, since repeated so many million times by 
others, “‘ How and where shall we bury you ?” 
Socrates rebukes the phrase instantly. “ Bury 
me,” he answers, “in any way you please, if 
you can catch me to bury,” “‘he at the same 
time smiling and looking gently round upon 
us,” says Plato, his biographer. “I cannot 
persuade Crito, my friends,” Socrates adds, 
“that I am the Socrates who is now convers- 
ing with you and arranging each part of this 
discourse; but he obstinately thinks I am 
that which he shall shortly behold dead, and 
he wants to know how he shall bury me. 
But that which I have been arguing to you 
so long—that when I have drunk this poison 
I shall be with you no longer, but shall de- 
part straightway to some happy state of the 
blessed—this I cannot convince him.” “Say 
rather, Crito,” he urges, pleadingly, once 
more—‘‘say, if you love me, Where shall you 
bury my body? and I will answer you, 
Bury it in any manner and in any place you 
please.”’ 

Many centuries have passed since then; 
sects and sages, faiths and governments, have 
come and gone. The world is taken captive 

137 


Ju After Days 


by a religion unknown to Socrates; yet still 
through Christendom the words of the great 
ancient philosopher survive; and with them 
the words of his faithless questioner linger 
also, and for one who speaks like Socrates 
to-day, a thousand even in Christendom speak 
like Crito. ‘The habitual forms and words 
of Christendom show this practical faith- 
lessness to the spiritual life it claims to 
monopolize. We drape our houses and our 
persons in gloomy black, beneath its influ- 
ence; and leave white to the pagan Chinese, 
and purple and golden hues to the heathen 
Greeks and Romans. It is centuries since 
Saint Charies Borromeo strove to substitute 
for the skeleton and the scythe the golden 
key of paradise; and yet the skeleton is still 
the symbol of death, and the scythe of terror. 

I speak as one reared on the vanishing edge, 
as it were, of the old Calvinistic faith, so as 
just to miss its gloomy training. My father, 
though a man of secular pursuits, was the 
first organizer of the Harvard Theological 
School, now thoroughly liberalized and al- 
ways looking in that direction. My mother, 
though reading more successive volumes of 

138 


— 
— eee en 


Ju Afier Days 


sermons than any one I ever knew, was a 
liberal Unitarian, said grace at the dinner- 
table, and held family prayers. We were al- 
lowed to play games on Sunday evening, but 
they were cards of what was then called 
“sacred geography,’ and I learned from 
them, once for all, that the capital of Da- 
homey was Abomey, which, indeed, became 
a saying in the family. I say these things 
because we are called upon to speak of per- 
sonal experiences as well as personal opin- 
ions. 

After these mild beginnings, I may frankly 
say that I never consciously at any period in 
my youth technically performed any process 
called “experiencing religion.”” What I did 
have the opportunity to appreciate, however, 
was the society of saints at home and sinners 
abroad, and, above all, the fact of certain 
very extraordinary cases of persons, inti- 
mately known to me, who underwent great 
and prolonged trials and sorrows without 
especial religious consolation. I was also 
born just in time to meet the strong influ- 
ences of Emerson, Parker, and Garrison. | 
walked in their paths and have never re- 

ro 139 


Ju After Days 


gretted it. All this was somewhat exception- 
al in those restricted days, whereas I now 
see around me on every side a generation to 
whom religion represents something liberal 
and cheering, not merely technical. ‘This is 
accompanied, however, by new problems of 
thought, perhaps harder than any which have 
preceded them. - Living as I do next door to 
a Catholic church whose thronged aisles and 
schools are heartily to be respected, I look 
over it to the high grounds of the Harvard 
Observatory, whence has just come to us 
within a few days the announcement of the 
discovery of a new-found planet in the solar 
system, farther off than any previously known, 
and so far that it will probably never be seen 
by the naked eye or even through the tele- 
scope, but only demonstrable through the 
eyes of abstract science. To the power 
which creates in the universe such inscru- 
table wonders what better can one say than 
“Benedicto benedicatur’”’? 

But the past is one thing, the present is 
another. Within my memory the early Colo- 
nial expressions of religion have largely gone 
out of use, and the changed utterances of the 

140 


Ju After Days 


present have taken their place. How largely, 
for instance, have the old habits of family 
prayers diminished, or even that of saying 
erace at private tables. Is this because there 
is no more need of them? Quite otherwise! 
Who is there who can go through the sorrows 
and bereavements of mortal life without days 
of anxiety and grief, perhaps even nights of 
tears? These may be periods in which there 
comes at length into the soul, even if only 
temporarily, a recognition, not merely of a 
Deity, but of a God close by, so near as to 
need no intermediate aid. At such a mo- 
ment do not all sects and creeds suddenly be- 
come valueless to us, and personal immor- 
tality seem as sure as to-morrow’s sunrise ? 
We have, in the Scripture phrase, gone into 
the closet and shut the door. At such a 
moment we do not, it may be, need an uttered 
word, or if we are to have it, it must be 
neither technical nor conventional. Some 
simple poem of Whittier, perhaps, some verse 
which the hymn-books have. borrowed from 
him and with a few daring touches have made 
their own, these give more than any Church 
ritual can offer, and we turn to a simple book 


141 


Su After Days 


like John Woolman’s Journal without caring 
for Church forms. 

But we are compelled to bear in mind the 
fact that beyond these personal experiences 
there is a world of religious imaginings, ex- 
citements, ordeals, which when once endured 
are not easily disposed of. More often they 
remain in the field. We speak of the ex- 
cesses of spiritualism, for instance, as some- 
thing gone by. But there lies before me a 
letter of twelve quarto pages from an edu- 
cated family in the Far West, some of whom 
are personally known to me, and whose 
respective houses are to this day filled 
with unexplained “sweet bell - sounds,” or 
““chimes,’’ as they describe them, sometimes 
thirty in a single day. These oftentimes 
chimed so easily with words, that by auto- 
matic writing, messages from the departed 
could be taken down and have a coherent 
meaning. At other times they seemed to 
ring in approval of some statement that had 
been made. ‘The bell - ringing is described 
in one of these curious letters as follows: 

‘Mother told me of hearing the bell 107 
times when she was alone. She and I heard 

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1 CREED haat ll ic ch a, a RRS 
it 28 times. Mother, Joseph, & I heard it 
once. Mary & I heard it twice. The four 
of us heard the sounds five times. Mother & 


Mary S. .. . heard it once. Mother and 
Mary T.... heard it seven times. . .. Mother, 
Mary, & Joseph heard it six times. . . . I 


heard the bell 71 times when I was alone; 42 
of those sounds were in my room a couple of 
blocks away”; and so on indefinitely. All 
this occurred, it will be observed, not to 
single hearers only, but to groups of differ- 
ent members of a large family, and all this 
at different localities, several blocks of houses 
apart. 

These and similar unexplained phenomena 
bring happiness to those who believe that they 
are messages from the spirit world; while 
to more prosaic minds they seem imagi- 
nary or uncanny. At any rate, this is one 
side. Observe, on the other hand, what a 
change has come over the habits of the cul- 
tivated mind in its view of the Hebrew and 
Christian Scriptures. “The general religious 
world,” says one of the highest scientific au- 
thorities, Sir Oliver Lodge, President of the 
University of Birmingham, “has agreed ap- 

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parently to throw overboard Jonah and the 
whale, Joshua and the sun, the three Chil- 
dren and the fiery furnace; it does not seem 
to take anything in the Book of Judges or 
the Book of Daniel very seriously; . . . it is 
willing to relegate to poetry—i.e., to imagi- 
nation or fiction—such legends as the crea- 
tion of the world, Adam and his rib, Eve and 
the apple, Noah and his ark, language and 
the tower of Babel, Elijah and the chariot 
of fire, and many others.” But he justly 
asks “‘if religious people go as far as this, 
where are they to stop? What, then, do they 
propose to do with the turning of water into 
wine, the ejection of devils, the cursing of 
the fig-tree, the feeding of five thousand, the 
raising of Lazarus ?’’' to say nothing of won- 
ders greater still which are evaded even by 
so liberal a man as Dr. Lyman Abbott. Yet 
science teaches us more and more unflinch- 
ingly that there has been no such thing in 
history as the fall of man, in the accustomed 
sense, It is tracing him, or claims to be, 


back through a tadpole and fish-like an- 


* Lodge’s Science and Immortality, 13, 14. 
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Su After Days 


cestry away to the early beginnings of exist- 
ence, but it has not been able to trace the 
origin of any portion of such life from dead 
matter. Perpetual efforts have been made 
by the most learned of modern men to reach 
the beginning of animal life; claims have 
been made more than once to have abso- 
lutely created it. In Germany, we are told 
“inorganic and artificial’ substances have 
been found to crawl about on glass slides 
under the action of surface-tension or capil- 
larity, with an appearance which is said to 
have deceived even a biologist.”* We are 
told that there is not such a student but be- 
lieves that sooner or later the discovery will 
be made, and that a cell having all the es- 
- sential functions of life’ will be constructed 
out of inorganic material. So vast has been 
the progress of chemistry that within sev- 
enty years the very word has lost its meaning 
and has advanced to deeper and more difh- 
cult properties. Profounder and profounder 
knowledge carries us far away from many 
an old tradition, but it still leaves untouched 


1 Lodge’s Science and Immortality, 18. 


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the instinct which convinces us that there 
is a God. ‘The poetic side exists as strongly 
and keeps as near to us as what is called 
philosophy. Whittier’s simple phrases carry 
us no farther than that song sung by Emily 
Bronté on her death-bed: 


“Though earth and man were gone 
And suns and universe ceased to be 
And Thou were left alone, 
Every existence would exist in Thee.” 


This is matched by the profounder eloquence 
of Carlyle: | 

“What, then, is man? What, then, is 
man!” 

‘He endures but for an hour, and is crush- 
ed before the moth. Yet in the being and 
in the working of a faithful man is there al- 
ready (as all faith from the beginning gives 
assurance) a something that pertains not to 
this wild death-element of Time; that tri- 
umphs over Time, and zs, and will be, when 
Time shall be no more.” ! 


* Lodge’s Science and Immortality, 161. 


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There lies before me a letter from that 
faithful friend of truth, Elizabeth Peabody, 
well-known as the source and founder in 
America of the kindergarten system. This 
letter, never before published, seems to me 
to touch the whole subject of human be- 
reavement more profoundly than anything 
else I know. 


“My DEAR ,—I must write to tell you how 
very much grieved I was to see in the paper to-day 
(but it was an old one) that you had lost your lit- 
tle darling in whose advent & welcome all your 
friends have so rejoiced with you. 

“‘T have sympathized with many parents as only 
one can who looks on childhood as I do. It is a 
terrible pang for a parent to have the angel pres- 
ence withdrawn so soon. But in a Father’s House 
we know that it is not without its other side— 
whatever happens—Just now you are I dare say 
in the mood of Emerson’s wail in the Threnody— 
Do you know that it was quite at first he poured 
out that song of woe—& it was not till a year 
afterward he wrote the rest—from the words ‘The 
Deep Heart replied’—-This fact gives both parts 
more meaning—and [I think you will find solace 
in reading just now the first part & then thinking 


147 


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of the rich consolation & instruction in store for 
you--You may be more to your race for going 
down into these mysterious depths. It is death 
which reveals the infinite sweetness of life ‘with 
the might of his sunbeams touching the day.’. . . 

“IT believe the mother here [on earth] can bless 
& develop it if she be true to her motherly love. 
It is an infinite tie—As the life of the Angel ex- 
pands, it must look with more and more gratitude 
upon the loving parents who invoked it from the 
bosom of God to personal consciousness. 

“But excuse me for making suggestions when 
God has spoken to you so intimately—‘As a 
Mother comforts her little one—so I comfort thee’ 


saith the Lord— 


“Your friend, 
“ Exiz. P. PEAasopy. 


“Concord, Mass— 


“March 20 [1880]” 


Strange indeed it is that the simple belief 
in immortality, so plain to Socrates and 
Cicero, should have become confused and 
bewildered in spite of those later religious 
teachings which would seem to make it sure. 
One of the most devoted mothers whom I 
ever knew, an eminent literary woman, when 

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her elder children had died and when her 
husband, a distinguished army officer, fol- 
lowed them suddenly, devoted herself ab- 
sorbingly to her remaining boy, a child of 
eight or ten, of uncommonly mature char- 
acter. When he was ill, these two entered 
into the most solemn pledges with each other 
that either of them which died first should, 
if it were possible, speak to the other in some 
form. ‘The boy died and she listened during 
her lifetime, but heard nothing. No one can 
count the number of cases in which the same 
thing may have been attempted in vain. 
“Neither philosophy nor science has added 
in countless ages,” says a brilliant modern 
writer, “‘a single demonstration of another 
life, nor faith nor pious supplication brought 
back one soul to tell us of our heaven.” 

On the other hand, how many noble souls 
unconsciously predict that heaven before they 
die? How many experiences we have, as we 
grow older, even among our own kindred, of 
lives that may be called heavenly in their 
very dying. Of a dearly loved cousin of 
mine, in Virginia, her daughter lately wrote: 
“On yesterday, at 2.30 P.M., my wonderful 

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mother passed into the beyond. She retained 
her faculties up to three minutes before 
death, and the same old seraphic smile, fa- 
miliar to you, [ know, came over her features 
and it was all over.” 

Still more striking was the death of a 
young woman who was engaged to a friend 
of mine, and who went out of this life with 
such superb faith in the beyond that the 
manner of her going is still—after a lapse 
of many years—an inspiring memory. She - 
died of consumption, of which dread disease 
her father, brother, and two sisters had al- 
ready been the victims. She sat in a great 
old-fashioned easy-chair, her hand clasped 
in that of her lover, while her mother and 
remaining sisters hovered anxiously about, 
though she herself remained perfectly con- 
scious and calm. Occasionally her face 
lighted up with what seemed a radiance 
from another world, and her eyes shone with 
a mysterious joy, as if she saw something 
invisible to the others. From this _half- 
translated state she would return from time 
to time to her familiar surroundings, when 
again the vision would enthrall her; and 

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while her face was thus transfigured, the end 
came. 

The same unconscious testimony lasts 
after death. Of my own mother, I can say 
that I never saw her beautiful face so calm 
and so full of deferred utterance as when | 
sat alone beside it after death; it was of 
itself a lesson in immortality—the very lesson 
implied in that fine saying of Swedenborg 
that ‘“‘in heaven the angels are advancing 
continually to the springtime of their youth, 
so that the oldest angel appears the youngest.” 

I know at least one woman poet who has 
strengthened my faith and expressed her own 
by this poem which has already comforted 
many hearts: 


IN DHE DARIC 


The fields were silent, and the woodland drear; 
The moon had set, and clouds hid all the stars; 
And blindly, when a footfall met my ear, 
I reached across the bars. 


And swift as thought this hand was clasped in thine, 
Though darkness hung around us and above; 
Not guided by uncertain fate to mine, 


But by the law of love. 
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I know not which of us may first go hence 
And leave the other to be brave alone, 
Unable to dispel the shadows dense 
‘That veil the life unknown; 


But if I linger last, and stretch once more 

A longing hand, when fades this earthly day, 
Again it will be grasped by thine, before 

My steps can lose the way. 


Ms i 


sy 


maj 
u 


re 
Ser) 

=F 0 ee 
a . 
CF a ‘ 


ee 
Lead 


WILLIAM HANNA THOMSON 


Che Future State 
William Hanna Chomson, A. 2. 


Vil 
Che Future State 


OT unlike one of Fontaine’s fables 1s 

the story of three small ants who, as 
they gathered on the dry leaf of a tree over- 
hanging a swiftly flowing river, the leaf 
loosened and was soon carrying them float- 
ing on the water. After a brief consultation 
each of the ants went to inspect one side of 
the leaf, and the collective report was that no 
land was to be seen on either side, but only 
moving water everywhere. Suddenly the leaf 
turned round and round in a way which the 
ants could in no wise prevent, for it had 
fallen into a little whirlpool and alarmed 
them by getting its hitherto dry surface wet. 
One of the ants then thought that he could 
get a wider view than his fellows by ascend- 
ing the upturned stem of the leaf, and thence 
see what he could see. He espied a number 

ae 155 


Su After Days 


of bubbles on the surface of the water and 
a large one of bright colors coming in con- 
tact with the edge of the leaf. Down he 
sped to take passage on this bubble, only to 
find that it could not bear the weight of one 
little ant, but forthwith disappeared and him- 
self with it. 

Such are we also upon the swiftly passing 
stream of our life. We scarcely know how 
we happened to be so placed, nor where the 
river is to take us; but we do know that the 
thing which carries us is very frail, and at 
any time may go under. What by this time 
we ought to know, also, is that we should 
not commit ourselves to any bubble of hu- 
man speculation. Such bubbles float about 
us in plenty, but after so many of them have 
been tested, our reason should tell us not to 
rely on the guesses of our fellows, who at 
their best cannot see much farther than we 
can see, but to seek rather to attach ourselves 
only to historic fact. For whatever has once 
been historic remains always historic, un- 
changed by the winds, the currents, and the 
storms of the centuries. ‘Therefore, the only 
way to deal with what claims to be historic 

156 


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is not to speculate about it, but to find 
whether it happened or not. 

Now the Christian religion is nothing un- 
less it be historical, because, as St. Paul justly 
says, it is so based on the historical event of 
the Resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, 
that if that Resurrection did not occur, the 
Christian faith is vain and nothing but the 
emptiest of delusions. We cannot appre- 
ciate this truth too deeply, for without the 
Resurrection, Death is still the Victor, and 
there can be no Christian religion nor Chris- 
tian hope. 

But whatever is asserted to be a historical 
event must be judged by the rules of histor- 
ical evidence, especially if, as in the case of 
the Resurrection, a length of time has elapsed 
since its occurrence. ‘Therefore, that event, 
above all others, must be supported by the 
testimony of a number and a variety of wit- 
nesses. Its effects also on those witnesses 
should be the same as we would look for on 
sober persons in our time if a like event hap- 
pened to them. Then if the event itself was 
so important that it would vitally affect the 
history of the world, the subsequent history 


157 


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of the world should show it. There is no 
escaping that conclusion, and we may say 
here that this is a test which no Christian 
need fear. For there has been nothing like 
the belief in the Resurrection for making 
history, recording both great triumphs and 
great setbacks for the Church. The un- 
availing persecutions of the Roman emper- 
ors, followed as they were by the great dis- 
aster of the conversion of Constantine, from 
the evils of which the Church has by no 
means yet recovered, the mighty struggle of 
the Crusaders for possession of the Sepul- 
chre of the Resurrection, and particularly 
modern Christendom itself, nineteen cen- 
turies after the Resurrection, bear no resem- 
blance to speculations or to theories, but are 
great historic facts, with the Cross and: the 
Triumph over Death above them all. 

The night before His death, our Lord, 
while walking to Gethsemane, said to His 
disciples, ““Apart from Me ye can do noth- 
ing!’ According to all precedents the separa- 
tion of death was soon to sunder Him from 
them as completely as death can part. Soon 
those disciples themselves all forsook Him 

158 


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and fled. But afterward those same fright- 
ened men, though seemingly quite apart from 
Him, calmly faced high priests, governors, 
and kings, as their Master foretold that 
they would. They themselves explain what 
wrought this great change in them—namely, 
that they had seen their Lord, who had died, 
alive again. We would be equally changed 
by such an experience. If a dear friend of 
ours whom we had seen die, and then buried 
before our eyes, should appear again to us 
unmistakably alive, and so converse with us, 
our whole thought about the next world 
would be wholly changed. If we were sound 
and true men this world and everything in 
it would then sink into insignificance. 

Nor can this story, which was accompanied 
by such intense personal conviction, be ex- 
plained away as one of those myths which not 
infrequently have grown up about a remark- 
able historical figure. Myths take time to 
grow, but long before any of the Gospel nar- 
ratives was composed, St. Paul wrote the 
chapter xv of I. Corinthians, in which he 
says that one and another, and then the 
‘Twelve, and then above five hundred men, 


#59 


Su After Bays 


at once saw the risen Lord, of whom the 
greater part were still living witnesses when 
he wrote; and last of all he himself saw and 
spoke with Jesus, with the result that he 
was never the same man again, and instead 
of hating Jesus he lived only for Him until 
he bowed his head to the axe. 

As a medical man myself, I have long been 
professionally acquainted with the phenom- 
ena of illusions and hallucinations. But I 
have never known them to last with sane 
persons, and least of all to have such persons 
risk their lives in asserting them. Illusions 
and hallucinations change nothing for long. 
At the most they are but passing gusts of 
wind and never could deposit the solid strata 
which history is made of. 

But if we attach ourselves to historic fact, 
our confidence should increase in proportion 
as we note to what supreme truths this fact 
is taking us. And so with the Resurrection 
as its corner-stone, Personality becomes all 
in all to Christianity, and thus separates it 
from all other religions, which connect the 
future state not so much with personality 
as with place. Most persons even now try 

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to picture what sort of place heaven is, and so 
they have recourse to the imagination, that 
most earthly of our faculties because it can- 
not make one of its pictures except out of 
materials furnished by earthly experience. 
Hence the essential sameness in all human 
conceptions of the other world. ‘The old 
Egyptian depicted an ideal Egypt beyond, 
with Egyptian good things rewarding the 
virtuous. [he Greek had his Elysian Fields, 
and the American Indian his happy hunt- 
ing-grounds. Mohammed’s paradise, how- 
ever, gives the fullest details of future bodily 
delights which would excite the Arab imagina- 
tion. Having lived during my youth among 
Mohammedans, I can say that nothing could 
so destroy everything good in human nature 
as a desire for the Moslem’s future state. 
So revolting and purely sensual is it through- 
out, that we should be thankful that Moses 
refrained altogether from mentioning the 
next world to his Hebrews. ‘They are the 
Shemitic cousins to the Arabs, and if in the 
formative stage in which they were then, 
their great lawgiver had given a hint of a 
future world, inevitably would they have pict- 
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ured it to themselves as an eternal abode 
of animalism. Instead, after the one awe- 
inspiring lesson of Sinai, that their God is 
the Holy and Righteous One, a lesson which 
forever kept them even when most inclined 
to idolatry, just as it has kept Europeans and 
Americans since, from ever confounding Je- 
hovah with the gods of the heathen, Moses 
then simply enjoined religion as the best 
thing for this life. 

A great principle appears here, which is 
that God’s revelations are always conditioned 
by human receptivity. 

But as the centuries of spiritual education 
rolled on, devout men had to explain to them- 
selves why, though Moses’ promise of pres- 
ent reward to those who lived a righteous life 
was true as a general principle, it was alto- 
gether wanting when applied to individuals. 
In the actual world in which they lived they 
saw men choosing murder as the chief means 
for political advancement, and profiting there- 
by. While such wicked men enjoyed every 
worldly prosperity, many righteous met with 
nothing but adversity. It is most instructive 
to note how often this painful perplexity tried 

162 


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the souls of the great psalmists, but also how 
in every case it finally led them to the con- 
viction of another world to come. What 
that world is to be they state in terms as clear 
and as beautiful as we find in any references 
to that subject in the New Testament. 

The reader should compare (in the Revised 
Wersion) Psi sxvisy Psy xviry Ps) xxi) (Ps, 
XXxvil, 37; Ps. xxi, 23-24. 

In the New Testament, on the other hand, 
apart from what is related about Christ Him- 
self in the interval between His Resurrection 
and His Ascension, there is only one pass- 
age which gives us any item of information 
about heaven, and that is in the account of 
the Transfiguration. From it we learn the 
precious truth of personal recognition and 
abiding individuality, because Moses and 
Elijah were the same persons then that they 
were when they lived on the earth. 

In the book of Revelation it is impossible 
for human curiosity to penetrate through its 
thick veil of metaphor to discern any of the 
circumstances, as they may be called, of 
heaven. It begins with a picture of seven 
golden lamp-stands brightly lighted. They 

163 


Jn After Days 


are seven Christian churches in places of 
thick darkness. It ends with a vision of a 
great city built entirely of precious stones 
and with gates of pearl. But this heavenly 
city turns out to be a great society of per- 
fected human persons, because it is the 
Church and also the Bride of the Lamb. 

But in that chapter of I. Corinthians, 
which, as we have stated, is chronologically 
one of the earliest parts of the New Testa- 
ment, and which was written after the date 
of the Resurrection at a less interval than 
that which separates us from the first term, 
as President, of Mr. Cleveland, Paul tells 
us more about the future state than we find 
in any other one passage in the Bible. We 
are to have bodies, but they are to be bodies 
which shall be free from flesh and blood for- 
ever. As there is no grown human body 
which is not composed of flesh and blood, 
Paul’s resurrection body must be very differ- 
ent from anything we see here. He, there- 
fore, soon hears one asking how such a thing 
could be. Paul answers by an appeal to the 
greatest mystery in the living world—a seed. 
But he could not have imagined then how 

104, 


eatin CN il el ca ii” i a ae ad 


Su After Days 


immeasurably modern science has strength- 
ened the force of that appeal. ‘The complet- 
est of all whales is one of whom 1,500,000 
such whales could be gathered into the space 
occupied by a pin’s head. He has then only 
one cell to his physical being, but that cell 
is a whale and nothing but a whale, and can- 
not possibly grow into a fish any more than 
it can grow into a bird, for whales are mam- 
mals and hence separated by an impassable 
biological gulf from all fishes. Long before 
it has either flesh or blood, that microscopic 
dot is a whale’s own body sure enough, be- 
cause from it alone are to grow the billions 
of cells of the adult whale’s body, each of 
them fashioned after the specific pattern of 
the first cell. Moreover, in that first cell is 
the indelible hereditary impress of the whale’s 
ancestors back to the first whale. 

Therefore, Paul’s argument, as we at pres- 
ent can state it, is that already a living body 
goes through the most marvellous changes 
without breaking its continuity with the body 
preceding it. That is because there is in it 
a living agency which is never the same with 
the physical materials which it moulds, any 

165 


In After Days 


more than an architect is the same with the 
stones of the building which he erects. Those 
earthly materials are constantly being changed 
and cast aside by that invisible architect 
which uses the materials as a temporary 
dress, and no more. Therefore, cannot the — 
Almighty, the Source of Life, clothe this 
the real body with the new garment of the 
risen body? He can, for the seed sown in 
weakness here will develop into the new body 
endowed with power, imperishable and glori- 
ous like the body of the Lord Man from 
Heaven. 

Instead, therefore, of a Greek hades, peo- 
pled by thin shades and ghosts, our heaven 
will show the dear features and lineaments of 
our departed so vividly that then for the 
first time we will know what life is. Here 
on earth, owing to the easy exhaustion of our 
mortal bodies, we lose one-third of our lives 
in sleep, and many of our waking hours we 
pass but little better than in a dream. But 
there it will be fulness of life for evermore. 
We need not then ask what our surroundings 
will be, for even on this poor earth a place 
is a garden or a desert according to those 

166 


Su After Days 


who live there. The promised eternal life 
is not to be mere existence, for what is life 
here without society with interchange of life 
with other living, active minds, hearts, and 
wills? We should, therefore, not ask where 
we are to be, but with whom we are to be in 
the world beyond. 

Many Christians are disturbed, if not 
shaken, at the rejection, by eminent men of 
the world, of our divine revelation, and par- 
ticularly by the falling away of so many 
from the faith of their fathers. But both 
these events in the future were repeatedly 
and explicitly foretold by our Lord and by 
His inspired apostles. They are all due to 
that deep unceasing antagonism of human 
nature, whose central motive is self and self- 
approval, to that new nature which the Holy 
Spirit alone can give, whose central motive 
is the all-searching principle of self-sacrifice, 
and of which Christ Himself is the greatest 
example. But again let us turn to historical 
fact. The end of every century since the 
Resurrection has shown more believers in 
Christ than at its beginning. Voltaire boast- 
ed that it took twelve men to found the 

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Gn After Days 


Christian Church, but it needed only one, 
himself, to overturn it. That was at the end 
of the eighteenth century. Now, at the end 
of the nineteenth century, there are at least 
five to one, compared with Voltaire’s time, 
whose faith rests upon the Risen One. 


The store which other religions put upon 
place in their conceptions of the future state 
shows how superficial they all are. In them 
the surroundings of self are more thought of 
than the self which is the centric fact of all. 
For human personality not only includes 
mind, but also feeling, disposition, and will; 
in other words, it is we as we are indeed. 
Personality is itself indestructible. What- 
ever part of the physical body be cut off, 
whether hand or foot, no part of the per- 
sonality goes with it. Modern medical science 
also proves that the brain does not itself 
think, but is only the instrument of the in- 
visible thinker, just as the hand is. Person- 
ality is also our certainty of certainties. 
Whatever the case may be with what is out- 
side of us, whether that be reality or only 
appearance, we inwardly are sure that we exist. 

168 


ieee . — o — a 
> ee ee ee eee ee ee 


Su After Days 


This is all in full accord with the state- 
ment, repeated five times for emphasis, when 
man is first spoken of in the Bible, that in 
man we are to see the image and likeness of 
God. When Moses asked God what His 
name is, the answer was, ‘My Name is—I 
am!" ‘That is also what man can say, I am! 
and never to better purpose than when he is 
thinking deeply about himself, about this 
world, and about the world which is to come, 
for then he can discern in himself these true 
likenesses to his Father. 

1. Man knows that he himself is invisible. 
No one can tell what he thinks or purposes 
within, unless he chooses to reveal himself, 
and, like God, he does not often reveal him- 
self except to those who sympathize with him. 

2. However he may change in his body 
- during his years, man remains the same per- 
sonality and never becomes any one else, 
so that he can truly say that he is the same 
yesterday as to-day, and, therefore, he will 
be the same hereafter. 

3. Alone of all beings on earth, man knows 
what law is, and that it is eternal and omni- 
present, ruling not only the material but also 

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the intelligent universe. Well, therefore, did 
the old Psalmist exclaim, as he recognized 
the majesty before him of judges in their 
seats, “I said ye are Elohim (God) and every 
one of you sons of the Most High! But if 
they forget this they would die like men” 
(Ps. Ixxxii, 6). There is no race of man, 
from the highest to the lowest, that does not 
know what the word justice means. 

4. But man also reflects in himself the 
Infinite. He does not know the word enough 
by experience, but insatiably asks for more, 
whether it be possession, power, or attain- 
ment. He is therefore equipped for a bound- 
less existence. Could I ever cease wanting 
to know more? 

5. But man is as true a creator as God 
Himself is, for a creator is one who gives 
origin to things which would not otherwise 
exist but for his intelligent purpose and de- 
sign. On that account the whole earth is 
full of things which man and not God has 
created. And what marvels many of those 
human creations are, showing what a master 
man is of both matter and force! How little 
does this earth now resemble what it was be- 

170 


Su After Days 


fore man took it in hand! And all this is 
done while his stay here is so brief. If only 
he had time, time never cut short by death, 
what would he accomplish! 

Such a being is of immeasurable worth. 
Value is a term which cannot be connected 
with anything impersonal. What is the value 
of the great antarctic continent if no one can 
live there? So a universe of matter is of no 
more value than empty space if it be of 
nothing but matter. Some speak of this 
earth as being such an insignificant speck 
among the starry worlds, that man must 
share in his world’s insignificance. But as 
those worlds are so largely composed of burn- 
ing hydrogen gas, how much hydrogen gas 
will it take to become valuable without a 
sentient being to make use of it? ‘The truth 
is that it is matter which is insignificant com- 
pared with one imperishable human mind. 

But there is a perfectability in man, the 
thought of which deeply stirs the heart. This 
was shown by men in the darkest days of the 
Old Testament when, without a clear reve- 
lation of the Rest beyond, they nevertheless 
faced a cruel death rather than deny God. 

12 EAP 


Qu After Days 


To appreciate poetry we should fully un- 
derstand the poet’s allusions. The xlii.- 
il. psalms (one psalm) was composed by a 
poor Hebrew captive as he was driven past 
Mt. Hermon in winter on his way to Babylon. 
Of the thirty-three peoples which Tiglath 
Pileser says he caused to undergo that terri- 
ble ordeal of captivity, not one survived it. 
Little, but abiding, Judah survived the cap- 
tivity, though this psalmist had witnessed 
the hideous spectacle of infants’ heads dashed 
by brutal soldiers against the stones lest they 
would encumber the march. The psalmist’s 
earliest journey had been with his parents— 
and who does not vividly remember such 
early journeys—to go up to the House of the 
Lord, and three times a year since he had 
joined in such pilgrimage to listen to 
the splendid antiphonies of Ps. cexviii, 
19-29, from the battlements of the Temple 
and the answers of the approaching multi- 
tude keeping holy day. But now he was like 
the thirsty hart which dreads to approach 
the water-brooks because it well knows that 
lions are waiting there for it. No sight in 
nature ever impressed me (the writer) as a 

172 


Su After Days 


storm on the slopes near Mt. Hermon when 
four waterspouts rose simultaneously from 
the darkened Mediterranean to the black 
cloud which stretched for a hundred miles 
over the sea, as it approached the great 
mountain range. Incessant lightning, with 
thunder which echoed through the valleys, 
caused our horses to tremble under us as 
the mighty phalanx of clouds drew near. 
“Deep calleth unto deep at the noise of Thy 
waterspouts; all Thy waves and Thy billows 
have gone over me.” But worst of all, “as . 
with a sword in my bones, mine enemies re- 
proach me, while they continually say unto 
me, where is thy god?’ According to all 
then accepted standards Jehovah had failed. 
He could not protect His own people from 
the bitterest of calamities, nor even His Tem- 
ple, for the Ark and the golden vessels were 
being carried by the heathen to put in tri- 
umph before the image of their mightier 
Merodach. But as each fresh recollection 
brought its anguish, this man could answer 
with that beautiful refrain, “‘Why art thou 
cast down, O my soul, and why art thou 
disquieted within me? Hope thou in God, 
173 


Mu After Bays 


for I shall yet praise Him who is the health 
of my countenance and my God!’ In com- 
parison with Christians in these days of 
light, being disquieted at the ranks of un- 
believers, what was this man’s faith? Prob- 
ably no archangel in heaven was ever sub- 
jected to such a test of loyalty to God as was 
this mourning: captive. Heart preference 
being the deepest test of character, we now 
can understand what justification by faith 
means, and that it will be the special honor 
through eternity of the redeemed children 
of men. 

I am now an old man, and five times have 
I stood at an open grave to see it close over 
the remains of my own beloved. The asso- 
clations connected with such experiences are 
too sacred for public mention or reference. 
It is only because I have been asked to write 
some words for the comfort of other bereaved 
ones that I do so now. An open grave is a 
cold and dark place. Vainly have I sought 
in human science or philosophy for a ray of 
light to dispel that darkness. There in our 
desolation and utter helplessness we do not 
ask for doctrine, not even for the doctrine 


174 


Su After Days 


of the Resurrection. We long for the pres- 
ence of a mighty Friend. And as such He 
comes with His unmistakable personal voice 
saying, “J am the Resurrection and the Life. 
Whosoever believeth in Me shall never die.” 
That is also in keeping with what Paul said 
as he approached his last day. I know—not 
what I believed—but whom I have believed. 
So when stricken ones turn to leave their 
scene of burial let them think of that inspired 
word. ‘For if we believe that Jesus died 
and rose again, even so those also that are 
fallen asleep in Jesus will God bring with 
Him.” What will that Reunion be! Our 
loved ones are given us here for us to learn 
and know in advance Him whose name is 
Love. How plainly we are told that we shall 
do so because we shall be then in His like- 
ness. When the beloved Apostle wrote, 
‘* Now are we the sons of God, and it doth not 
yet appear what we shall be: but we know 
that when He shall appear we shall be like 
Him, for we shall see Him as He is,” he was 
but echoing the words of the old Psalmist, 
“*As for me, I shall be satisfied when I awake 
in Thy likeness.” 


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GUGLIELMO FERRERO 


Che Lite After This 


Guyliclun Herrero 


VIll 
Che Hife After This 


“Qui fit, Maecenas, ut nemo, quam sibi sortem 
Seu ratio dederit, seu fors obiecerit, illa 
Contentus vivat; laudet diversa sequentes?” ... 


“Why, O Mecenas, is no one content with his 
lot, whether it be chosen by himself or thrust 
upon him by fate, but praises those that fol- 
low other callings? ‘O fortunate merchants!’ 
cries the soldier, burdened with years and broken 
with much labor. The merchant in his turn, while 
his ships are buffeted by the winds, declares the 
soldiers’ life the better. And why? Hand to 
hand they fight; in a moment comes swift death 
or happy victory. The lawyer praises the farmer, 
when at cockcrow the client knocks at his door. 
The countryman, come to the city on summons 
from court, declares only the city-dweller happy.” 


Ss: it was in the days of the greatest splendor 
of Rome, when the civil wars were ended 
and the city was on the point of uniting and 


179 


Jn After Days 


enjoying, under a sceptre of peace, the vast 
empire conquered by three centuries of fort- 
unate wars; so its great poet, Horace, voiced 
the universal discontent, the restless dissat- 
isfaction of all. Who does not see that these 
verses might be with equal truth repeated 
of our own times, in the refulgence of wealth, 
of power, of glory, of knowledge, that en- 
lightens modern civilization? Men have 
never been so rich, so powerful, so clever, as 
they now are; nor have they ever been so 
discontented, so anxious for change, the prey 
of so intemperate a mania to find new homes, 
different occupations, fresh experiences of 
life. To how many of us will befall the 
lot of being laid to rest for the eternal 
sleep in the village or the city where our 
eyes first saw the sun? Almost no man is 
disposed to carry on the profession of his 
father; the new generation seems always 
bent upon beginning over again; every- 
body changes from one study to another, 
from one profession to another, impelled 
by the continuous need of seeking a perfec- 
tion, a greater happiness, an ideal ever van- 
ishing, which, ever deluding our hopes and 
180 


Se ii ee 


Su After Days 


expectations, is the supreme torment of our 
lives. 

This is exactly the same state of things as 
existed in the time of Horace, and for the 
same reasons. Riches, power, knowledge, do — 
not increase our happiness, just as they did 
not increase it for the contemporaries of the 
great poet of Venosa; for we also, like the 
Romans of the period of Augustus, place 
the end of living too much within ourselves. 
We lose faith in those ideas and beliefs that 
propose to man an aim outside himself, be- 
yond his own personal interests and pleas- 
ures and the time in which he lives—ideals 
that sometimes cause him to sacrifice to this 
high end his own interests, his personal pleas- 
ures, and even the brief moment of time that 
is to him the whole patrimony of life. These 
ideals, these beliefs, are chiefly three: glory, 
family, and a future life. 

If there be a sentiment that has almost en- 
tirely disappeared from the mind of the 
modern man, it is the solicitude for the good 
opinion of posterity. Among the ancients, 
on the contrary, at least in cértain epochs 
in the history of the Greeks and Romans, 

181 


Au After Days 


how vivid was this feeling! The admiration 
of posterity, the perpetuation of one’s own 
name—in a word, immortality—was then a 
need among minds elect, an obligation in 
great families: to satisfy this need, to main- 
tain this obligation, individuals and families 
often cheerfully suffered exile, persecution, 
ruin, and even death. Man lived spiritually 


almost in contact with future generations. | 


Religion, tradition, literature, all fed this 
ardent hunger for immortality among choice 
spirits. ‘To-day they do it no more: states- 
men, writers, philosophers, artists, athletes, 
all are anxious to know, not what the world 
will think of them in the twenty-first and 
twenty-second centuries, but what the news- 
paper with the largest number of readers will 
say of them the next day. The present, with 
its struggles, its passions, its urgencies, and 
its multiple seductions, quite bars out our 
vision of what is to come. No civilization 
has considered the future less than our own 
has done, and no age has therefore been less 
able to enjoy the comforts that absorbing 
interest in a future life can give to man. 
The longing for immortality as expressed 
182 


a ~~ 


Su After Days 


in the attainment of glory can be comfort 
and stimulus to but a small minority—the 
minority made up of men singularly gifted, 
and of aristocratic families already habitu- 
ated to the power and wealth secured by 
preceding generations. The vast majority 
are necessarily shut out from winning great 
distinction, because only a few in every gen- 
eration can reasonably hope to survive for 
centuries in the memory of posterity. In 
fact, this passion for glory is found only in 
intellectual or political aristocracies. 

The cult of ancestors, on the other hand, 
the religion of family, as known by ancient 
Greeks and Romans and practised to-day in 
China, can give the joys of a more restricted 
immortality to all who, among the events of 
common existence, succeed in founding and 
continuing a family for several generations. 
Then a man knows that, although all the 
efforts put forth by him to preserve and 
augment the material fortune and the repu- 
tation of the family—his own laboriousness, 
his spirit of self-abnegation, his sufferings— 
will bring to him in person but transitory 
recompense upon the earth, the greatest re- 

183 


Su After Bays 


ward will come after death; then, for his 
own children, he will be transformed into a 
god, and as such will be venerated and in- 
voked by them; then, without further pain 
or trouble, he will enjoy the complete devo- 
tion of his descendants, and without risk or 
fatigue to himself can return their worship 
by doing them good as the guardian spirit of 
their daily affairs. 

Who in the European-American civiliza- 
tion holds this faith to-day? Not only the 
transformation of our ideas in regard to the 
spiritual principle of man makes it difficult 
for us to conceive the Manes to whom the 
Romans rendered homage, or the souls of 
ancestors whom the Chinese so piously ven- 
erate; but more, the dissolution of the family 
extinguishes the sentiment from which that 
cult is born and developed. Children grow 
up to-day with ideas too different from those 
of their parents, and detach themselves too 
soon from the family that has educated them. 
Europe and America seem destined to be cov- 
ered by an infinite number of separate hearth- 
fires, each too small to outlast a generation, 
and their indifferent builders can neither 

184 


Su After Bays 


believe in their own immortality nor find in 
such an ideal a force and serenity that shall 
illumine their daily affairs. At the cost of 
great effort the modern age succeeds in saving 
that last material relic of the ancient cult of 
family—the religion of the tomb. But for 
how long? Will the sons who love their 
parents be able much longer to bury them 
among flowers and heap upon their graves 
the memorial signs of filial affection? I fear 
that one day or other some hygienist will in- 
vent a machine or a process utterly and in- 
stantly to destroy the body, and that the 
practical spirit of years to come will decide 
to spare the expense of cemeteries. Who 
does not know that land in modern cities is 
extravagantly dear? ‘The lodging of the 
dead costs too much. 

So much the more ought men to take refuge 
in the belief in the future life—this immor- 
tality opened to all, even the poorest and the 
simplest; not only to him who will never 
succeed in making his own name famous in 
some grand empire, but also to him who can 
never found a family, ‘The belief in the fut- 
ure life, if it do not altogether die out, in- 

185 


Jun After Days 


stead of gaining ground, is becoming to many 
minds a thing as vague, indefinite, and color- 
less as it was to the contemporaries of Horace; 
it can then no more sustain and console men 
in annoyance and adversity. Perhaps the 
doctrines in which this belief has taken shape 
no longer suit the changed conditions of 
men’s minds, and new teachings able to re- 
place them have not been yet formulated. 
Perhaps modern life too much absorbs and 
fatigues the spirit, insisting that every man, 
even he of humble circumstances, shall learn 
and do too many things; so that he has 
neither the leisure nor the will to test ideals, 
and, sounding them, to stir his imagination 
till it transform them into something more 
precious and important than the guise in 
which they first appeared. Modern men are 
proud of their activity; but the too active 
life spurns the contemplative, atrophies the 
imagination, habituates the spirit to heeding 
only concrete things. 

From this extinguishing of the ideal pas- 
sions, this failing of the imagination, this 
obliterating of the beliefs that put to life 
some end beyond the material, is born the 

186 


Se 


1 
: 


Ju After Days 


trouble, the malcontent, and the pessimism 
of our day, like that which tormented the 
times of Horace. 


“L’homme est un puits ou le vide toujours 
Recommence,” 


wrote Victor Hugo. There is nothing to-day 

more unreasonable than the bitter envy with 
which so many look upon others who seem 
to possess those supreme gifts of life, wealth 
and power. Feeling themselves unhappy or 
discontented, most men attribute their state 
to a want of material means, or to the lit- 
tle power at their command. It does not 
occur to them that two centuries ago men in 
their relative condition had less wealth and 
no power, yet complained far less than 
we; that the matter is plainly and solely 
envy. 

In fact, we live in a time when riches and 
power have little weight in producing hap- 
piness, and, therefore, are of relatively lit- 
tle value, because men are too anxious 
for them and forget everything else for 
them. 

13 187 


Su After Days 


“Oui, de leur sort tous les hommes sont las, 
Pour étre heureux a tous—destin morose! 
Tout a manqué. Tout, c’est a dire, hélas, . 
Peu de chose.” 


Again [ quote Victor Hugo. The peu de 
chose that fails us is precisely a desire, strong 
and sure, for something unattainable in this 
life. Man cannot be happy unless he ar- 
dently longs for and awaits with assurance 
—which is more difficult than the longing— 
something he will not be able to obtain while 
he lives, be it immortal glory, or the loving 
cult of surviving children, or the paradise 
splendors of an eternity yonder; unless he 
projects beyond the span of his own life a 
vital part of his aspirations and invests them 
with his living spiritual forces. If all his 
desires be fully circumscribed by the time in 
which he lives, what happens toa man? On 
the one hand, he strains himself desperately 
to satisfy them, without relaxing for a mo- 
ment of respite, worrying over his unsuc- 
cesses and jealous of his more fortunate 
rivals. Who will be able to compensate him 
for what he has not possessed and enjoyed 
188 


Ju After Days 


in this life, if beyond it he sees, he wishes, 
he craves nothing more? Fortune and suc- 
cess, then, seem the essential condition for 
happiness, and they are the paramount cause 
of the envy that gnaws his heart. Only an- 
other illusion! Probably the most restless 
and discontented men to-day are those who 
have won success most easily and found fort- 
une most benign. Every wish once grati- 
fied wears upon a man, and brings forth new 
wants, ever the more importunate. What 
before possession seemed enviable fortune, 
proves soon after the winning but the gray 
uniformity of a wonted condition: upon the 
height sighed for from afar, man walks as on 
a wearisome lowland plain. New aspirations 
are forever springing into being from as- 
pirations satisfied; and if at a certain junc- 
ture a man does not manage to direct his 
mind toward some goal fixed beyond the 
term of his natural existence; if he does not 
find his joy in working for a prize unattain- 
able as long as he lives, he will one day find 
himself full of riches and of discontent, fort- 
uned materially, beggared in mind. No 
man—not even of the rarest intelligence and 
189 


In After Days 


energy—can satisfy desires, constantly self- 
renewing, in a world where every man is 
searching for some portion of felicity. And 
every man, after having secured his part of 
the good things of this life, is bound to with- 
draw himself to enjoy them in tranquillity 
and to leave the field free to those who have 
not yet acquired their share: if he be not dis- 
posed to make this renunciation spontane- 
ously, other men almost invariably find the 
means to constrain him to it! 

Full of worldly goods, but infelicitous, is 
the state of many a man whom the masses 
envy most. He seeks to shake off the plague 
of satished desires by running about the 
world, multiplying the diversions and excite- 
ments of his surroundings, straining his pow- 
ers in frenzied labor that has no aim if not 
itself, nor can it further serve, unless to 
astound us: but in vain! The automobile 
cannot become a factor in felicity when the 
organ of felicity is atrophied within us. 
Machines can write, cut, saw, weigh, run, 
make accounts, and, in part, think for us; 
but they cannot solve the insoluble contra- 
dictions of our sensibility and our sentiment, 

190 


Su After Bays 


nor annul the effects of our selfishness. ‘The 
man who lives only in himself, for himself, 
with himself, will torment himself to the end. 
There is but one means adequate to hold in 
check the insatiable eagerness of sense and 
passion—that is, to desire intensely, with 
faith, something outside ourselves, striving 
energetically to win it. ‘This means is at the 
disposition of all, the poor as well as the 
rich, the unlettered as well as the learned— 
perhaps the poor and the ignorant can make 
even readier and larger use of it than the 
rich! 

Herein subsists the true human equality; 
that which is not written in statute laws, 
nor is it proclaimed by formal religions, but 
which exists in the individual human soul, 
and in the laws that govern the passions and 
the thoughts of man, eternal and immutable 
as the physical laws of nature. How often 
has man protested against that mysterious 
force that scatters in so arbitrary a fashion, 
with such apparent injustice, the material 
and moral good things of life? Why has one 
man a profound and brilliant genius, while 
another’s mind is simple and slow? Why 


1g 


Gnu After Days 


should some men have money, delight in art, 
enjoy luxury, command their fellows, while 
others live sadly, in poverty, in ignorance, 
subordinate to others? These protests would 
be legitimate and well founded if wealth and 
power were the absolute causes of satisfac- 
tion. They are, instead, often the occasions 
of unhappiness, of corruption, of ennut, ex- 
actly because a man rich and powerful, vain- 
glorious, vitiated by facility in pleasure, al- 
most invariably makes himself his own god, 
confounds the brief moment of his stay upon 
earth with eternity, and forgets how to wish 
for anything beyond time and self. All his- 
torians have been surprised at the moral de- 
generation that sooner or later undoes classes 
and families, once arrived at power and 
wealth,—that corruption and weakness which 
sooner or later supplant the virtues of the 
forefathers, who acquired the greatness. The 
main cause of this decadence is always the 
same: incapacity to will and to. long for 
something beyond personal pleasure. 

I know that many people regard this tend- 
ency of the modern mind to separate itself 
from all beliefs that set before man an un- 

192 


Su After Days 


temporal aim, as an effect of the intellectual 
progress and of the growing ability and cult- 
ure of our age. All the forms through which 
men have sought to render comprehensible 
to the multitude the philosophical concept 
of the future life—what are they to them 
but children’s fables, which the matured rea- 
son throws away, laughing? Why—they ask 
—in an age when personal energy is the might 
that moulds the world, must the ardor of the 
young stand subject to the prudence of the 
old, in family traditions that are the cult of 
decrepit nations? It seems to many that 
democratic progress has done great service 
to man in eradicating immortality from the 
heart, a plant at home only in the soil of 
prejudice and aristocratic injustice. But 
should not all men feel themselves more 
readily equals and brothers, since all are 
bound to disappear together forever, with 
their own time? 

I would not press this theory to its limits, 
but merely maintain that it has a content of 
truth, like all theories on human affairs. 
Since the world to-day is more inclined to 
admire its virtues than to recognize its de- 

193 


Jn After Days 


fects, I prefer to insist upon one point—ask- 
ing, how far is this transformation of ideas 
and sentiments the effect of an overgrown 
egoism? It is so convenient—or at least at 
first sight it seems so convenient—to live 
only in the present, to spend all our efforts 
upon ourselves, to take into the account of 
real happiness only what can be seen, touched, 
numbered, weighed, measured! All civili- 
zations decay from an excess of egoism, the 
product of wealth and power: are not these 
phenomena that we witness a proof that 
our boasted civilization also begins to suffer 
from this moral disease? With the growing 
indifference to the unseen world and_ the 
problems of the future life, is there not also 
diffused a dangerous indifference to the in- 
terests of the species? 

In fact, as always happens, this egoism, 
once apparently wise, begins to prove itself 
ingenuous and fallacious. Pretending to in- 
sure to man more happiness than he can ac- 
tually enjoy, it loads him with annoyance, 
with weariness and dissatisfaction. The 
moral restlessness that belonged in the past 
to a few élites, overrich, overlearned, and 

194 


> 


rm 
t 


Su After Bays 


therefore self-centred, is now spread through- 
out two continents, in all classes, notwith- 
standing the ameliorated material conditions 
and the advance of culture. This is not 
strange, at least for him who knows men and 
history; since neither increased comfort nor 
wider instruction will further the happiness 
of man if it teaches him only to wear shinier 
shoes and better laundered collars, but gives 
him no mind to look before him beyond his 
- own allotted lifetime. 


HENRY JAMES 


Ia Chere a Lite After Death? 


Henry James 


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Is There a Lite After Death? 


Part I 


| CONFESS at the outset that I think it 
the most interesting question in the world, 
once it takes on all the intensity of which it 
is capable. It does that, insidiously but in- 
evitably, as we live longer and longer—does 
it at least for many persons; I myself, in any 
case, find it increasingly assert its power to ’ 
attach and, if I may use the word so unjustly 
compromised by trivial applications, to amuse. 
I say “‘assert its power” so to occupy us, be- 
cause I mean to express only its most gen- 
eral effect. That effect on our spirit is 
mostly either one of two forms; the effect of 
making us desire death, and for reasons, ab- 
solutely as welcome extinction and termina- 
tion; or the effect of making us desire it as 


£9 


Su After Days 


a renewal of the interest, the appreciation, 
the passion, the large and consecrated con- 
sciousness, in a word, of which we have had 
so splendid a sample in this world. Either 
one or the other of these opposed states of 
feeling is bound finally to declare itself, we 
judge, in persons of a fine sensibility and 
whose innermost spirit experience has set 
vibrating at all; for the condition of indif- 
ference and of knowing neither is the con- 
dition of living altogether so much below the 
human privilege as to have little right to pass 
for unjustly excluded or neglected in this 
business of the speculative reckoning. 

That an immense number of persons 
should not recognize the appeal of our specu- 
lation, or even be aware of the existence of 
our question, is a fact that might seem to de- 
mand, in the whole connection, some particu- 
lar consideration; but our anxiety, our hope, 
or our fear, hangs before us, after all, only 
because it more or less torments us, and in 
order to contribute in any degree to a dis- 
cussion of the possibility we have to be con- 
sciously in presence of it. I can only see it, 
the great interrogation or the great depre- 

200 


Su After Days 


cation we are ultimately driven to, as a part 
of our general concern with life and our gen- 
eral, and extremely various—because I speak 
of each man’s general—mode of reaction 
under it; but to testify for an experience we 
must have reacted in one way or another. 
The weight of those who don’t react may be 
felt, it it true, in one of the scales; for it may 
very well be asked on their behalf whether 
they are distinguishable as “‘living” either 
before or after. Only the special reaction 
of others, or the play of thecr speculation, 
however, will, in due consideration, have put 
it there. How can there be a personal and a 
differentiated life ‘‘after,” it will then of 
course be asked, for those for whom there 
has been so little of one before ?—unless in- 
deed it be pronounced conceivable that the 
possibility may vary from man to man, from 
human case to human case, and that the 
quantity or the quality of our practice of 
consciousness may have something to say to 
it. If I myself am disposed to pronounce - 
this conceivable—as verily I expect to find 
myself before we have done—I must glance 
at a few other relations of the matter first. 
201 


Qu After Days 


My point for the moment is that the more 
or less visibly diminishing distance which 
separates us at a certain age from death is, 
however we are affected toward the sup- 
position of an existence beyond it, an in- 
tensifier of the feeling that most works in 
us, and that in the light of the lamp so held 
up our aggravated sense of life, as I may 
perhaps best call it, our impression of what 
we have been through, is what essentially 
fosters and determines, on the whole ground, 
our desire or our aversion. So, at any rate, 
the situation strikes me, and one can speak 
of it but for one’s personal self. The sub- 
ject is portentous and any individual utterance 
upon it, however ingenious or however grave, 
but comparatively a feeble pipe or a pathetic 
quaver; yet I hold that as we can scarce 
have too many visions, too many statements or 
pictures of the conceived social Utopia that 
the sincere fond dreamer, the believer in bet- 
ter things, may find glimmer before him, so 
the sincere and struggling son of earth among 
his fellow-strugglers reports of the positive 
or negative presumption in the savor of his 
world, that is not to be of earth, and thus 

202 


Su After Days 


drops his testimony, however scant, into the 
reservoir. It all depends, in other words, 
the weight or the force or the interest of this 
testimony does, on what life has predomi- 
nantly said to us. And there are those—I 
take them for the constant and vast majority 
—to whom it in the way of intelligible sugges- 
tion says nothing. Possibly immortality it- 
self—or another chance at least, as we may 
freely call it—will say as little; which is a 
fair and simple manner of disposing of the 
idea of a new start in relation to them. 
Though, indeed, I must add, the contem- 
plative critic scarce—save under one prob- 
ability—sees why the universe should be at 
the expense of a new start for those on whom 
the old start appears (though but to our pur- 
blind sight, it may, of course, be replied) so 
to have been wasted. The probability is, in 
fact, that what we dimly discern as waste 
the wisdom of the universe may know as a 
very different matter. We don’t think of 
slugs and jellyfish as the waste, but rather 
as the amusement, the attestation of wealth 
and variety, of gardens and sea-beaches; so 
why should we, under stress, in respect to the 
14 203 


Su After Days 


human scene and its discussable sequel, 
think differently of dull people f 

This is but an instance, or a trifle, how- 
ever, among the difficulties with which the 
whole case bristles for those on whom the 
fact of the lived life has insisted on thrusting 
it, and which it yet leaves them tormentedly 
to deal with. The question is of the personal 
experience, of course, of another existence; 
of its being I my very self, and you, definitely, 
and he and she, who resume and go on, and 
not of unthinkable substitutes or metamor- 
phoses. The whole interest of the matter 1s 
that it is my or your sensibility that is in- 
volved and at stake; the thing figuring to 
us as momentous just because that sensibility 
and its tasted fruits, as we owe them to life, 
are either remunerative enough and sweet 
enough or too barren and too bitter. Only 
because posthumous survival in some other 
conditions involves what we know, what we 
have enjoyed and suffered, as our particular 
personal adventure, does it appeal to us or 
excite our protest; only because of the asso- 
ciations of consciousness do we trouble and 
consult ourselves—do we wish the latter pro- 

204 


Ju Afier Days 


longed and wonder if it may not be inde- 
structible, or decide that we have had enough 
of it and invoke the conclusion that we have 
so had it once for all. We pass, I think, 
through many changes of impression, many 
shifting estimates, as to the force and value 
of those associations; and there is no single, 
there is no decisive sense of them in which, 
throughout our earthly course, it is easy or 
needful to rest. 

Whatever we may begin with we almost 
inevitably go on, under the discipline of life, 
to more or less resigned acceptance of the 
grim fact that “science” takes no account 
of the soul, the principle we worry about, and 
that, as however nobly thinking and feeling 
creatures, we are abjectly and inveterately 
shut up in our material organs. We flutter 
away from that account of ourselves, on sub- 
lime occasion, only to come back to it with 
the collapse of our wings, and during much 
of our life the grim view, as I have called it, 
the sense of the rigor of our physical basis, 
is confirmed to us by overwhelming appear- 
ances. Ihe mere spectacle, all about us, of 
personal decay, and of the decay, as seems, 

205 


Jn After Days 
of the whole being, adds itself formidably to 


that of so much bloom and assurance and 
energy—the things we catch in the very fact 
of their material identity. There are times 
when all the elements and qualities that con- 
stitute the afrmation of the personal life here 
affect us as making against any apprehensible 
other affirmation of it. And that general 
observation and evidence abide with us and 
keep us company; they reinforce the verdict 
of the dismal laboratories and the confident 
analysts as to the interconvertibility of our 
genius, as it comparatively is at the worst, 
and our brain—the poor palpable, ponder- 
able, probeable, laboratory-brain that we 
ourselves see in certain inevitable conditions 
—become as naught. 

It brings itself home to us thus in all sorts 
of ways that we are even at our highest flights 
of personality, our furthest reachings out of 
the mind, of the very stuff of the abject actual, 
and that the sublimest idea we can form and 
the noblest hope and affection we can cherish 
are but flowers sprouting in that eminently 
and infinitely diggable soil. It may be as 
favorable to them—as well as to quite other 

206 | 


Su After Days 


moral growths—as we are free to note; but 
we see its power to put them forth break 
down and end, and ours to receive them from 
it to do the same—we watch the relentless 
ebb of the tide on which the vessel of experi- 
ence carries us, and which to our earthly 
eyes never flows again. It is to the personal- 
ity that the idea of renewed being attaches 
itself, and we see nothing so much written 
over the personalities of the world as that 
they are finite and precarious and insuscep- 
tible. All the ugliness, the grossness, the 
stupidity, the cruelty, the vast extent to 
which the score in question is a record of 
brutality and vulgarity, the so easy non- 
existence of consciousness, round about us 
as to most of the things that make for living 
desirably at all, or even for living once, let 
alone on the enlarged chance—these things 
fairly rub it into us that to have a personality 
need create no presumption beyond what 
this remarkably mixed world is by itself 
amply sufficient to meet. A renewal of being, 
we ask, for people who understand being, 
even here, where renewals, of sorts, are pos- 
sible, that way, and that way, apparently, 
- 207 


ju After Days 


alone ?—leaving us vainly to wonder, in 
presence of such obvious and offensive matter 
for decay and putrescence, what there is for 
renewal to take hold of, or what element may 
be supposed fine enough to create a claim for 
disengagement. The mere fact in short that 
so much of life as we know it dishonors, or 
at any rate falls below, the greater part of 
the beauty and the opportunity even of this 
world, works upon us for persuasion that 
none other can be eager to receive it. 

With which all the while there co-operates 
the exhibited limitation of our faculty for 
persistence, for not giving way, for not doing 
more than attest the inextinguishable or ex- 
tinguishable spark in the mere minimum of 
time. The thinkable, the possible, we are 
fairly moved to say, in the way of the resist- 
ances and renewals of our conceded day, 
bafe us and are already beyond our com- 
mand; I mean in the sense that the spirit 
even still in activity never shows as recover- 
ing, before our present eyes, an inch of the 
ground the body has once fairly taken from 
it. The personality, the apparently final 
eclipse of which by death we are discussing, 

208 


Su Afier Days 


fails, we remark, of any partial victory over 
partial eclipses, and keeps before us, once 
for all, the same sharp edge of blackness on 
the compromised disk of light. Even while 
“we” nominally go on those parts of us that 
have been overdarkened become as dead; 
our extinct passions and faculties and inter- 
ests, that is, refuse to revive; our personality, 
by which I mean our “soul,” declining in 
many a case, or in most, by inches, is aware 
of itself at any given moment as it 1s, how- 
ever contracted, and not as it was, however 
magnificent; we may die piecemeal, but by 
no sign ever demonstrably caught does the 
“liberated” spirit react from death piece- 
meal. ‘The answer to that may of course be 
that such reactions as can be “caught” are 
not claimed for it even by the fondest lovers 
of the precarious idea; the most that is 
claimed is that the reaction takes place some- 
where—and the farther away from the condi- 
tions and circumstances of death the more 
probably. The apparently significant thing 
is none the less that during slow and succes- 
sive stages of material extinction some near- 
ness—of the personal quantity departing to 
209 


Jn After Days 


the personal quantity remaining, and in the 
name of personal association and _ personal 
affection, and to the abatement of utter per- 
sonal eclipse—might be supposable; and 
that this is what we miss. 

Such, at least, is one of the faces, however 
small, that life put on to persuade us of the 
utterly contingent nature of our familiar in- 
ward ease—ease of being—and that, to our 
comfort or our disconcertment, this famil- 
larity is a perfectly restricted thing. And 
so we go on noting, through our time and 
amid the abundance of life, everything that 
makes, to our earthly senses, for the unmis- 
takable absoluteness of death. Every hour 
affords us some fresh illustration of it, drawn 
especially from the condition of others; but 
one, if we really heed it, recurs and recurs 
as the most poignant of all. How can we 
not make much of the terrible fashion in 
which the universe takes upon itself to em- 
phasize and multiply the disconnectedness of 
those who vanish from our sight >—or they 
perhaps not so much from ours as we from 
theirs; though indeed if once we lend our- 
selves to the hypothesis of posthumous reno- 

210 


Qu After Days 


vation at all, the fact that our ex-fellow- 
mortals would appear thus to have taken up 
some very much better interest than the poor 
world they have left might pass for a posi- 
tively favorable argument. On the basis of 
their enjoying another state of being, we have 
certainly to assume that this 1s the case, for to 
the probability of a quite different case the 
inveteracy of their neglect of the previous 
one, through all the ages and the spaces, the 
grimness of their utter refusal, so far as we 
know it, of a retrospective personal sign, 
would seem directly to point. (I can only 
treat here as absolutely not established the 
value of those personal signs that ostensibly 
come to us through the trance medium. 
These often make, I grant, for attention and 
wonder and interest—but for interest above 
all in the medium and the trance. Whether 
or no they may in the given case seem to 
savor of another state of being on the part 
of those from whom they profess to come, 
they savor intensely, to my sense, of the 
medium and the trance, and, with their 
remarkable felicities and fitnesses, their im- 
mense call for explanation, invest that per- 
211 


Su After Days 


sonage, in that state, with an almost ir- 
resistible attraction.) 

Here it is, at any rate, that we break our- 
selves against that conception of immortality 
as personal which 1s the only thing that gives 
it meaning or relevance. That it shall be 
personal and yet shall so entirely and relent- 
lessly have yielded to dissociation, this makes 
us ask if such terms for it are acceptable to 
thought. Is to be as dissociated as that con- 
sistent with personality as we understand our 
share in the condition ?—since on any con- 
tingency save by that understanding of it 
our interest in the subject drops. I prac- 
tically know what I am talking about when I 
say, “I,” hypothetically, for my full experi- 
ence of another term of being, just as I know 
it when I say “‘I” for my experience of this 
one; but | shouldn’t in the least do so were 
I not able to say “‘1”—had I to reckon, that 
is, with a failure of the signs by which I 
know myself. In presence of the great ques- 
tion I cling to these signs more than ever, 
and to conceive of the actual achievement of 
immortality by others who may have had like 
knowledge I have to impute to such others 

212 


re a ee. 


Su After Days 


a clinging to similar signs. Yet with that 
advantage, as it were, for any friendly re- 
participation, whether for our sake or for 
their own, in that consciousness in which 
they bathed themselves on earth, they yet 
appear to find no grain of relief to bestow on 
our anxiety, no dimmest spark to flash upon 
our ignorance. This fact, as after middle 
life we continue to note it, contributes to the 
confirmation, within us, of our seeming aware- 
ness of extinct things as utterly and veritably 
extinct, with whatever splendid intensity we 
may have known them to live; an awareness 
that settles upon us with a formidable weight 
as time and the world pile up around us all 
their affirmation of other things, and all im- 
portunate ones—which little by little acts 
upon us as so much triumphant negation of 
the past and the lost; the flicker of some 
vast sardonic, leering ‘‘Don’t you see?’ on 
the mask of Nature. 

We tend so to feel that become for us the 
last word on the matter that all Nature and 
all life and all society and all so-called knowl- 
edge, with everything these huge, grim in- 
differences strive to make, and to some degree 

213 


Sn After Days 


succeed in making, of ourselves, take the 
form and have the effect of a mass of machin- 
ery for ignoring and denying, the universe 
through, everything that is not of their own 
actuality. So it is, therefore, that we keep 
on and that we reflect; we begin by pitying 
the remembered dead, even for the very dan- 
ger of our indifference to them, and we end 
by pitying ourselves for the final demonstra- 
tion, as it were, of their indifference to us. 
“They must be dead, indeed,” we say; “they 
must be as dead as ‘science’ affirms, for this 
consecration of it on such a scale, and with 
these tremendous rites of nullification, to 
take place.” We think of the particular 
cases of those who could have been backed, 
as we call it, not to fail, on occasion, of some- 
how reaching us. We recall the forces of 
passion, of reason, of personality, that lived 
in them, and what such forces had made 
them, to our sight, capable of; and then we 
say, conclusively, “Talk of triumphant iden- 
tity if they, wanting to triumph, haven’t 
done it!” 

Those in whom we saw consciousness, to 
all appearance, the consciousness of us, slow- 

214 


Su After Days 


ly déménager, piece by piece, so that they 
more or less consentingly parted with it—of 
them let us take it, under stress, if we must, 
that their ground for interest (an us and in 
other matters) “unmistakably” reached its 
limit. But what of those lights that went 
out in a single gust and those life passions 
that were nipped in their flower and their 
promise? Are these spirits thinkable as havy- 
ing emptied the measure the services of sense 
could offer them? Do we feel capable of a 
brutal rupture with registered promises, 
started curiosities, waiting initiations? ‘The 
mere acquired momentum of intelligence, of 
perception, of vibration, of experience in a 
word, would have carried them on, we argue, 
to something, the something that never takes 
place for us, if the laboratory-brain were not 
really all. What it comes to is then that our 
faith or our hope may to some degree resist 
the fact, once accomplished, of watched and 
deplored death, but that they may well break 
down before the avidity and consistency with 
which everything insufferably contznues to 


die. 


In After Days 


Part II 


I have said “we argue” as we take in im- 
pressions of the order of those I have glanced 
at and of which I have pretended to mention 
only afew. Iam not, however, putting them 
forward for their direct weight in the scale; 
I speak of them but as the inevitable obses- 
sion of those who with the failure of the il- 
lusions of youth have had to learn more and 
more to reckon with reality. For if I re- 
ferred previously to their bearing us increase 
of company I mean this to be true with the 
qualification that applies to our whole atti- 
tude, or that of many of us, on our question 
—the fact that it is subject to the very shift- 
ing admonitions of that reality, which, may 
seem to us at times to mean one thing and at 
times quite another. Yet rather than at- 
tempt to speak, to this effect, even for “many 
of us,” I had best do so simply for myself, 
since it is only for one’s self that one can 
positively answer. It is a matter of individual 
experience, which I have seen multiply, to 
satiety, the obsessions I have named and then 

216 


7” ——a eS 


Su After Days 
suffer them to be displaced by others—only 


once more to reappear again and once more 
to give way. I speak as one who has had 
time to take many notes, to be struck with 
many differences, and to see, a little typically 
perhaps, what may eventually happen; and 
I contribute thus, and thus only, my grain of 
consideration to the store. 

I began, I may accordingly say, with a 
distinct sense that our question didn’t ap- 
peal to me—as it appeals, in general, but 
scantly to the young—and [| was content for 
a long time to let it alone, only asking that 
it should, in turn, as irrelevant and insoluble, 
let me. This it did, in abundance, for many 
a day—which is, however, but another way 
of saying that death remained for me, in a 
large measure, unexhibited and unaggressive. 
The exhibition, the aggression of life was 
quite ready to cover the eround and fill the 
bill, and to my sense of that balance still in- 
clined even after the opposite pressure had 
begun to show in the scale. Resented be- 
reavement is all at first—and may long go 
on appearing more than anything else—one 
of the exhibitions of life; the various forms 

217 


Ju Afirer Days 


and necessities of our resentment sufficiently 
meet then the questions that death brings 
up. JLhat aspect changes, however, as we 
seem to see what it is to die—and to have 
died—in contradistinction to suffering (which 
means to warmly being) on earth; and as we 
so see what it is the difficulties involved in 
the thought of its not being absolute tend to 
take possession of us and rule us. Treating 
my own case, again, as a “given” one, I 
found it long impossible not to succumb—so 
far as one began to yield at all to irresistible 
wonder—to discouragement by the mere piti- 
less dryness of all the appearances. This was 
for years quite blighting to my sensibility; 
and the appearances, as I have called them— 
and as they make, in “‘science”’ particularly, 
the most assured show—imposed themselves; 
the universe, or all of it that I could make 
out, kept proclaiming in a myriad voices that 
I and my poor form of consciousness were a 
quantity it could at any moment perfectly do 
without, even in what I might be pleased to 
call our very finest principle. If without me 
then just so without others; all the more 
that if it was not so dispensing with them the 
218 


Su After Mays 


simply béte situation of one’s forever and for- 
ever failing of the least whiff of a positive 
symptom to the contrary would not so in- 
effably persist. 

During which period, none the less, as I 
was afterward to find, the question subtly 
took care of itself for me—waking up as | 
did gradually, in the event (very slowly in- 
deed, with no sudden start of perception, no 
bound of enthusiasm), to its facing me with 
a “‘mild but firm” refusal to regard itself as 
settled. That circumstance once noted, I 
began to inquire—mainly, I confess, of my- 
self—why it should be thus obstinate, what 
reason it could at all clearly give me; and 
this led me in due course to my getting, or at 
least framing my reply: a reply not perhaps 
so multitudinous as those voices of the unt- 
verse that I have spoken of as discouraging, 
but which none the less, I find, still holds its 
eround for me. What had happened, in 
short, was that all the while I had been prac- 
tically, though however dimly, trying to take 
the measure of my consciousness—on this 
appropriate and prescribed basis of its being 
so finite—I had learned, as | may say, to 

15 219 


Ju After Days 


live in it more, and with the consequence of 
thereby not a little undermining the conclu- 
sion most unfavorable to it. I had doubtless 
taken thus to increased living in it by reaction 


against so grossly finite a world—for it at 


least contained the world, and could handle 
and criticise it, could play with it and deride 
it; it had that.superiority: which meant, all 
the while, such successful living that the 
abode itself grew more and more interesting 
to me, and with this beautiful sign of its 
character that the more and the more one 
asked of it the more and the more it appeared 
to give. I should perhaps rather say that 
the more one turned it, as an easy reflector, 
here and there and everywhere over the 1m- 
mensity of things, the more it appeared to 
take; which is but another way of putting, 
for “‘interest,’’ the same truth. 

I recognize that the questions I have come 
after this fashion to ask my consciousness are 
questions embarrassed by the conditions of 
this world; but it has none the less left me 
at last with a sense that, beautiful and ador- 
able thing, it is capable of sorts of action for 
which I have not as yet even the wit to call 

220 


i ee ee ee re 


Su After Dayz 


upon it. Of what I suggestively find in it, 
at any rate, I shall speak; but I must first 
explain the felt connection between this en- 
larged impression of its quality and portée 
and the improved discussibility of a life here- 
after. I hope, then, I shall not seem to push 
the relation of that idea to the ampler enjoy- 
ment of consciousness beyond what it will 
bear when I say that the ground is gained by 
the great extension so obtained for one’s 
precious inward ‘“‘personality’’—one’s per- 
sonality not at all in itself of course, or 
on its claims of general importance, but as 
conceivably hanging together for survival. 
It is not that I have found in growing older 
any one marked or momentous line in the 
life of the mind or in the play and the free- 
dom of the imagination to be stepped over; 
but that a process takes place which I can 
only describe as the accumulation of the very 
treasure itself of consciousness. I won’t say 
that “the world,’ as we commonly refer to 
it, grows more attaching, but will say that 
the universe increasingly does, and that this 
makes us present at the enormous multipli- 
cation of our possible relations with it; re- 
221 


Ju After Days 


lations still vague, no doubt, as undefined as 
they are uplifting, as they are inspiring, to 
think of, and on a scale beyond our actual 
use or application, yet filling us (through the 
“law” in question, the law that conscious- 
ness gives us immensities and imaginabilities 
wherever we direct it) with the unlimited 
vision of being. ‘This mere fact that so small 
a part of one’s visionary and speculative and 
emotional activity has even a traceably in- 
direct bearing on one’s doings or purposes or 
particular desires contribute strangely to the 
luxury—which is the magnificent waste—of 
thought, and strongly reminds one that even 
should one cease to be in love with life it 
would be difficult, on such terms, not to be 
in love with living. 

Living, or feeling one’s exquisite curiosity 
about the universe fed and fed, rewarded and 
rewarded—though I of course don’t say 
definitely answered and answered—becomes 
thus the highest good I can conceive of, a 
million times better than not living (however 
that comfort may at bad moments have 
solicited us); all of which illustrates what I 
mean by the consecrated “interest” of con- 

222 


Gn After Days 


sciousness. It so peoples and animates and 
extends and transforms itself; it so gives me 
the chance to take, on behalf of my per- 
sonality, these inordinate intellectual and ir- 
responsible liberties with the idea of things. 
And, once more—speaking for myself only 
and keeping to the facts of my experience— 
it is above all as an artist that I appreciate 
this beautiful and enjoyable independence 
of thought and more especially this assault 
of the boundlessly multiplied personal rela- 
tion (my own), which carries me beyond 
even any “‘profoundest” observation of this 
world whatever, and any mortal adventure, 
and refers me to realizations I am condemned 
as yet but to dream of. For the artist the 
sense of our luxurious “‘waste” of postulation 
and supposition is of the strongest; of him 
is it superlatively true that he knuws the 
aggression as of infinite numbers of modes 
of being. His case, as I see it, is easily such 
as to make him declare that if he were not 
constantly, in his commonest processes, car- 
rying the field of consciousness further and 
further, making it lose itself in the ineffable, 
he shouldn’t in the least feel himself an 
223 


Jn After Days 


artist. As more or less of one myself, for 
instance, I deal with being, I invoke and 
evoke, | figure and represent, I seize and 
fix, as many phases and aspects and con- 
ceptions of it as my infirm hand allows me 
strength for; and in so doing | find myself— 
I can’t express it otherwise—in communica- 
tion with sources; sources to which I owe the 
apprehension of far more and far other com- 
_binations than observation and experience, 
in their ordinary sense, have given me the 
pattern of. 

The truth is that to live, to this tune, in- 
tellectually, and in order to do beautiful 
things, with questions of being as such ques- 
tions may for the man of imagination abound- 
ingly come up, is to find one’s view of one’s 
share in it, and above all of its appeal to be 
shared, in an infinite variety, enormously en- 
larged. ‘The very provocation offered to the 
artist by the universe, the provocation to him 
to be—poor man who may know so little 
what he’s in for!—an artist, and thereby 
supremely serve it; what do I take that for 
but the intense desire of being to get itself 
personally shared, to show itself for person- 

224 


——_ =~ or OO 


Qu After Days 


ally sharable, and thus foster the sublimest 
faith? If the artist’s surrender to invasive 
floods is accordingly nine-tenths of the 
matter that makes his consciousness, that 
makes mine, so persuasively interesting, so 
I should see people of our character peculiarly 
victimized if the vulgar arrangement of our 
fate, as I have called it, imputable to the 
power that produced us, should prove to be 
the true one. For I think of myself as en- 
joying the very maximum reason to desire the 
renewal of existence—existence the forms of 
which I have had admirably and endlessly 
to cultivate—and as therefore embracing it 
in thought as a possible something that shall 
be better than what we have known here; 
only then to ask myself if it be credible that 
the power just mentioned is simply enjoying 
the unholy ‘“‘treat” or brutal amusement of 
encouraging that conviction in us in order to 
say with elation: ‘“‘ Then you shall have it, 
the charming confidence (for | shall wantonly 
let it come to that), only so long as that it 
shall beautifully mature; after which, as soon 
as the prospect has vividly and desirably 
opened out to you, you shall become as naught.” 
225 


Sn After Days 


“Well, you will have had them, the sense 
and the vision of existence,” the rejoinder 
on that may be; to which I retort in turn: 
“Yes, I shall have them exactly for the space 
of time during which the question of my 
appetite for what they represent may clear 
itself up. The complete privation, as a more 
or less prompt sequel to that clearance, is 
worthy but of the wit of a sniggering little 
boy who makes his dog jump at a morsel only 
to whisk it away; a practical joke of the 
lowest description, with the execrable taste of 
which I decline to charge our prime origi- 
nator.” 

I do not deny of course that the case may 
be different for those who have had another 
experience—there are so many different ex- 
periences of consciousness possible, and with 
the result of so many different positions on 
the matter. Those to whom such dreadful 
things have happened that they haven’t even 
the refuge of the negative state of mind, but 
have been driven into the exasperated posi- 
tive, so that they but long to lay down the 
burden of being and never again take it up— 
these unfortunates have an equal chance of 

2.26 


Su After Days 


expressing their attitude and of making it as 
eloquent and as representative as they. will. 
Their testimony may easily be tremendous 
and their revelation black. Will they be- 
long, however, to the class of those the really 
main condition of whose life is to work and 
work their inner spirit to a productive or il- 
lustrative end, and so to feel themselves find 
in it a general warrant for anything and 
everything, in the way of particular pro- 
jections and adventures, that they may 
dream that spirit susceptible of ? ‘This comes 
again to asking, doubtless, whether it has 
been their fate to perceive themselves, in the 
fulness of time, and for good or for ill, living 
preponderantly by the imagination and hay- 
ing to call upon it at every turn to see them 
through. By which I don’t mean to say 
that no sincere artist has ever been over- 
whelmed by life and found his connections 
with the infinite cut, so that his history may 
seem to represent for him so much evidence 
that this so easily awful world is the last 
word to us, and a horrible one at that: cases 
confounding me could quite too promptly 
be adduced. ‘The point is, none the less, that 
227 


Sn After Days 


in proportion as we (of the class I speak of) 
enjoy the greater number of our most char- 
acteristic inward reactions, in proportion as 
we do curiously and lovingly, yearningly and 
irrepressibly, interrogate and_ liberate, try 
and test and explore, our general productive 
and, as we like conveniently to say, creative 
awareness of things—though the individual, 
I grant, may pull his job off on occasion and 
for a while and yet never have done so at all 
—in that proportion does our function strike 
us as establishing sublime relations. It is 
this effect of working it that is exquisite, it 
is the character of the response it makes, and 
the merest fraction or dimmest shade of 
which is ever reported again in what we 
“have to show’’; it is in a word the artistic 
consciousness and privilege in itself that thus 
shines as from immersion in the fountain of 
being. Into that fountain, to depths im- 
measurable, our spirit dips—to the effect of 
feeling itself, gud imagination and aspiration, 
all scented with universal sources. What is 
that but an adventure of our personality, and 
how can we after it hold complete discon- 
nection likely ? 
228 


Qu After Days 


I do not so hold it, I profess, for my own 
part, and, above all, I freely concede, do not 
in the least want to. Consciousness has 
thus arrived at interesting me too much and 
on too great a scale—that is all my revelation 
or my secret; on too great a scale, that 15) 
for me not to ask myself what she can mean 
by such- blandishments—to © the altogether 
normally hampered and benighted random 
individual that I am. Does she mean noth- 
ing more than that I shall have found life, 
by her enrichment, the more amusing here? 
But I find it, at this well-nigh final pass, 
mainly amusing in the light of the possibility 
that the idea of an exclusively present world, 
with all its appearances wholly dependent 
on our physical outfit, may represent for us 
but a chance for experiment in the very inter- 
est of our better and freer being and to its 
very honor and reinforcement; but a chance 
for the practice and initial confidence of our 
faculties and our passions, of the precious per- 
sonality at stake—precious to us at least— 
which shall have been not unlike the sus- 
taining frame on little wheels that often en- 
cases growing infants, so that, dangling and 

229 


In After Days 


shaking about in it, they may feel their as- 
surance of walking increase and teach their 
small toes to know the ground. I like to 
think that we here, as to soul, dangle from 
the infinite and shake about in the uni- 
verse; that this world and this conformation 
and these senses are our helpful and in- 
genious frame, amply provided with wheels 
and replete with the lesson for us of how to 
plant, spiritually, our feet. That conception 
of the matter rather comes back, I recognize, 
to the theory of the spiritual discipline, the 
purification and preparation on earth for 
heaven, of the orthodox theology —which is 
a resemblance I don’t object to, all the more 
that it is a superficial one, as well as a fact 
mainly showing, at any rate, how neatly ex- 
tremes may sometimes meet. 

My mind, however that may be, doesn’t 
in the least resent its association with all the 
highly appreciable and perishable matter of 
which the rest of my personality is composed; 
nor does it fail to recognize the beautiful 
assistance—alternating indeed frequently with 
the extreme inconvenience—received from it; 
representing, as these latter forms do, much 

230 


Su After Days 


ministration to experience. The ministra- 
tion may have sometimes affected my con- 
sciousness as clumsy, but has at other times 
affected it as exquisite, and it accepts and 
appropriates and consumes everything the 
universe puts in its way; matter in tons, if 
necessary, so long as such quantities are, in 
so mysterious and complicated a sphere, one 
of its conditions of activity. Above all, it 
takes kindly to that admirable philosophic 
view which makes of matter the mere en- 
casement or sheath, thicker, thinner, coarser, 
finer, more transparent or more obstructive, 
of a spirit it has no more concern in producing 
than the baby-frame has in producing the 
intelligence of the baby—much as that 1n- 
telligence may be so promoted. 

I “like” to think, I may be held too art- 
lessly to repeat, that this, that, and the other 
appearances are favorable to the idea of the 
independence, behind everything (cts every- 
thing), of my individual soul; I “like” to 
think even at the risk of lumping myself with 
those shallow minds who are happily and 
foolishly able to believe what they would 
prefer. It isn’t really a question of belief— 

231 


Qu After Bays 


which is a term I have made no use of in 
these remarks; it is on the other hand a 
question of desire, but of desire so confirmed, 
so thoroughly established and nourished, as 
to leave belief a comparatively irrelevant 
affair. There is one light, moreover, under 
which they come to the same thing—at least 
in presence of a question as insoluble as the 
one before us. If one acts from desire quite 
as one would from belief, it signifies little 
what name one gives to one’s motive. By 
which term action I mean action of the 
mind, mean that I can encourage my con- 
sciousness to acquire that interest, to live in 
that elasticity and that affluence, which affect 
me as symptomatic and auspicious. I can’t 
do less if I desire, but I shouldn’t be able to 
do more if I believed. Just so I shouldn’t be 
able to do more than cultivate belief; and it is 
exactly to cultivation that I subject my hope- 
ful sense of the auspicious; with such suc- 
cess—or at least with such intensity—as to 
give me the splendid illusion of doing some- 
thing myself for my prospect, or at all events 
for my own possibility, of immortality. There 
again, I recognize extremes “neatly meet”; 
232 


OE a 


. 0 eee ee ee 


Su After Bays 


one doesn’t talk otherwise, doubtless, of one’s 
working out one’s salvation. But this coin- 
cidence too I am perfectly free to welcome— 
putting it, that is, that the theological pro- 
vision happens to coincide with (or, for all I 
know, to have been, at bottom, insidiously 
built on) some such sense of appearances as 
my own. If I am talking, at all events, of 
what I “like” to think I may, in short, say 
all: I like to think it open to me to establish 
speculative and imaginative connections, to 
take up conceived presumptions and pledges, 
that have for me all the air of not being de- 
cently able to escape redeeming themselves. 
And when once such a mental relation to the 
question as that begins to hover and settle, 
who shall say over what fields of experience, 
past and current, and what immensities of 
perception and yearning, it shall not spread 
the protection of its wings? No, no, no—l 
reach beyond the laboratory-brain. 


THE END 


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